Page:The Wings of the Dove (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1902), Volume 2.djvu/411

 him in the light of it. "You look upset—you've certainly been tormented. You're not well."

"Oh—well enough!"

But she continued without heeding. "You hate what you're doing."

"My dear girl, you simplify"—and he was now serious enough. "It isn't so simple even as that."

She had the air of thinking what it then might be. "I of course can't, with no clue, know what it is." She remained, however, patient and still. "If at such a moment she could write you, one is inevitably quite at sea. One doesn't, with the best will in the world, understand." And then as Densher had a pause which might have stood for all the involved explanation that, to his discouragement, loomed before him: "You haven't decided what to do."

She had said it very gently, almost sweetly, and he didn't instantly say otherwise. But he said so after a look at her. "Oh yes, I have. Only with this sight of you here and what I seem to see in it for you!" And his eyes, as at suggestions that pressed, turned from one part of the room to an other.

"Horrible place, isn't it?" said Kate.

It brought him straight back to his inquiry. "Is it for anything awful you've had to come?"

"Oh, that will take as long to tell you as anything you may have. Don't mind," she continued, "the 'sight of me here,' nor whatever—which is more than I yet know myself—may be 'in it' for me. 401