Page:The Wings of the Dove (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1902), Volume 2.djvu/388

 It made him helplessly gaze. "You call it so 'well'? You've touches, upon my soul!"

"I call it perfect—from my original point of view. I'm just where I was; and you must give me some better reason than you do, my dear, for your not being. It seems to me," she continued, "that we're only right, as to what has been between us, so long as we do wait. I don't think we wish to have behaved like fools." He took in, while she talked, her imperturbable consistency; which it was quietly, queerly hopeless to see her stand there and breathe into their mild, remembering air. He had brought her there to be moved, and she was only immovable—which was not moreover, either, because she didn't understand. She understood everything—and things he wouldn't; and she had reasons, deep down, the sense of which nearly sickened him. She had too again, most of all, her strange, significant smile. "Of course, if it is that you really know something?" It was quite conceivable and possible to her, he could see, that he did. But he didn't even know what she meant, and he only looked at her in gloom. His gloom, however, didn't upset her. "You do, I believe, only you've a delicacy about saying it. Your delicacy to me, my dear, is a scruple too much. I should have no delicacy in hearing it, so that if you can tell me you know"

"Well?" he asked as she still kept what depended on it. 378