Page:The Wings of the Dove (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1902), Volume 2.djvu/55

. It was even already a little the effect of this communion that Mrs. Stringham perceptibly faltered in her retort to Mrs. Lowder's joke. "Oh, it's precisely my point that Mr. Densher can't have had vast opportunities." And then she smiled at him. "I wasn't away, you know, long."

It made everything, in the oddest way in the world, immediately right for him. "And I wasn't there long, either." He positively saw, with it, that nothing, for him, so far as she was concerned, would again be wrong. "She's beautiful, but I don't say she's easy to know."

"Ah, she's a thousand and one things!" replied the good lady, as if now to keep well with him.

He asked nothing better. "She was off with you, to these parts, before I knew it. I myself was off too—away off to wonderful parts, where I had endlessly more to see."

"But you didn't forget her!" Aunt Maud interposed, with almost menacing archness.

"No, of course I didn't forget her. One doesn't forget such charming impressions. But I never," he lucidly maintained, "chattered to others about her."

"She'll thank you for that, sir," said Mrs. Stringham with a flushed firmness.

"Yet doesn't silence in such a case," Aunt Maud blandly inquired, "very often quite prove the depth of the impression?"

He would have been amused, had he not been 45