Page:The Wings of the Dove (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1902), Volume 2.djvu/341

 The result of it was the oddest consciousness as of a blessed calm after a storm. He had been trying, for weeks, as we know, to keep superlatively still, and trying it largely in solitude and silence; but he looked back on it now as on the heat of fever. The real, the right stillness was this particular form of society. They walked together and they talked, looked up pictures again and recovered impressions—Sir Luke knew just what he wanted; haunted a little the dealers in old wares; sat down at Florian's for rest and mild drinks; blessed, above all, the grand weather, a bath of warm air, a pageant of autumn light. Once or twice, while they rested, the great man closed his eyes—keeping them so for some minutes while his companion, the more easily watching his face for it, made private reflections on the subject of lost sleep. He had been up at night with her—he in person, for hours; but this was all he showed of it, and this was apparently to remain his nearest approach to an allusion. The extraordinary thing was that Densher could take it in perfectly as evidence, could turn cold at the image looking out of it; and yet that he could at the same time not intermit a throb of his response to accepted liberation. The liberation was an experience that held its own, and he continued to know why, in spite of his deserts, in spite of his folly, in spite of everything, he had so fondly hoped for it. He had hoped for it, had sat in his room there waiting for it, because he had thus divined in it, should it come, some power 331