Page:The Wings of the Dove (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1902), Volume 2.djvu/284

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didn't go home, on leaving her—he didn't want to; he walked, instead, through his narrow ways and his campi with gothic arches, to a small and comparatively sequestered café where he had already more than once found refreshment and comparative repose, together with solutions that consisted, mainly and pleasantly, of further indecisions. It was a literal fact that those awaiting him there to-night, while he leaned back on his velvet bench with his head against a florid mirror and his eyes not looking further than the fumes of his tobacco, might have been regarded by him as a little less limp than usual. This was not because, before he had got to his feet again, there was a step he had seen his way to; it was simply because the acceptance of his position took sharper effect from his sense of what he had just had to deal with. When he had turned about, to Milly, at the palace, half-an-hour before, on the question of the impossibility he had so strongly felt, turned about on the spot and under her eyes, he had acted, of a sudden, as a consequence of seeing much further, seeing how little, how not at all, impossibilities mattered. It wasn't a case for pedantry; when people were at her pass everything was allowed. And 274