Page:The Wings of the Dove (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1902), Volume 2.djvu/375

 week he stood convicted to his own sense of a surrender to Mrs. Lowder's view. He had somehow met it at a point that had brought him on—brought him on a distance that he couldn't again retrace. He had private hours of wondering what had become of his sincerity; he had others of simply reflecting that he had it all in use. His only want of candour was Aunt Maud's wealth of sentiment. She was hugely sentimental, and the worst he did was to take it from her. He wasn't so himself—everything was too real; but it was none the less not false that he had been through a mill.

It was in particular not false, for instance, that when she had said to him, on the Sunday, almost cos ily, from her sofa behind the tea, "I want you not to doubt, you poor dear, that I'm with you to the end!" his meeting her half way had been the only course open to him. She was with him to the end—or she might be—in a way Kate wasn't; and even if it literally made her society meanwhile more soothing, he must just brush away the question of why it shouldn't. Was he professing to her in any degree the possession of an aftersense that wasn't real? How in the world could he, when his aftersense, day by day, was his greatest reality? That was at bottom all that there was between them, and two or three times over it made the hour pass. These were occasions—two and a scrap—on which he had come and gone without mention of Kate. Now that, almost for the first time, he was free to ask 365