Page:The Wings of the Dove (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1902), Volume 2.djvu/42

 "Try it—you'll see," the girl once more returned. "We must manage as we can."

"That's precisely what I feel. It strikes me we might manage better." His idea of this was a thing that made him for an instant hesitate; yet he brought it out with conviction. "Why won't you come to me?"

It was a question her troubled eyes seemed to tell him that he was scarce generous in expecting her definitely to answer, and in looking to him to wait at least she appealed to something that she presently made him feel as his pity. It was on that special shade of tenderness that he thus found himself thrown back; and while he asked of his spirit and of his flesh just what concession they could arrange she pressed him yet again on the subject of her singular remedy for their embarrassment. It might have been irritating had she ever struck him as having in her mind a stupid corner. "You'll see," she said, "the difference it will make."

Well, since she was not stupid she was intelligent; it was he that was stupid—the proof of which was that he would do what she liked. But he made a last effort to understand, her allusion to the "difference" bringing him round to it. He indeed caught at something subtle but strong even as he spoke. "Is what you meant a moment ago that the difference will be in her being made to believe you hate me?"

Kate, however, had simply, for this gross way of putting it, one of her more marked shows of 32