Page:The Wings of the Dove (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1902), Volume 2.djvu/291

 had almost invidiously brought him down the outer staircase—the massive ascent, the great feature of the court, to Milly's piano nobile. This was to pay him—it was the one chance—for the vulgar view; the view that, clever and not rich, the young man from London was—by the obvious way—after Miss Theale's fortune. It was to pay him for the further implication that he must take the young lady's most devoted servant (interested scarcely less in the high attraction) for a strangely superficial person if he counted, in such a connection, on impunity and prosperity. The view was a vulgar one for Densher because it was but the view that might have been taken of another man,,and three things alone, accordingly, had kept him from righting himself. One of these was that his critic sought expression only in an impersonality, a positive inhumanity, of politeness; the second was that refinements of expression in a friend's servant were not a thing a visitor could take action on; and the third was the fact that the particular attribution of motive did him, after all, no wrong. It was his own fault if the vulgar view and the view that might have been taken of another man happened so incorrigibly to fit him. He apparently wasn't so different from another man as that came to. If therefore, in fine, Eugenic figured to him as "my friend" because he was conscious of his seeing so much in him, what he made him see, on the same lines, in the course of their present interview was ever so much more. Densher felt that he 281