e your head off any day, any day I really open my mouth; and I'm
dealing with you now, see--and successfully judge--without opening it.
I do things handsomely all round--I place you in the presence of the
plan with which, from the moment it's a case of taking you seriously,
you're incompatible. Come then as near it as you like, walk all round
it--don't be afraid you'll hurt it!--and live on with it before you."

He afterwards felt that if she hadn't absolutely phrased all this it
was because she so soon made him out as going with her far enough. He
was so pleasantly affected by her asking no promise of him, her not
proposing he should pay for her indulgence by his word of honour not to
interfere, that he gave her a kind of general assurance of esteem.
Immediately afterwards, then, he spoke of these things to Kate, and
what then came back to him first of all was the way he had said to
her--he mentioned it to the girl--very much as one of a pair of lovers
says in a rupture by mutual consent: "I hope immensely, of course, that
you'll always regard me as a friend." This had perhaps been going
far--he submitted it all to Kate; but really there had been so much in
it that it was to be looked at, as they might say, wholly in its own
light. Other things than those we have presented had come up before the
close of his scene with Aunt Maud, but this matter of her not treating
him as a peril of the first order easily predominated. There was
moreover plenty to talk about on the occasion of his subsequent passage
with our young woman, it having been put to him abruptly, the night
before, that he might give himself a lift and do his newspaper a
service--so flatteringly was the case expressed--by going, for fifteen
or twenty weeks, to America. The idea of a series of letters from the
United States from the strictly social point of view had for some time
been nursed in the inner sanctuary at whose door he sat, and the moment
was now deemed happy for letting it loose. The imprisoned thought had,
in a word, on the opening of the door, flown straight out into
Densher's face, or perched at least on his shoulder, making him look up
in surprise from his mere inky office-table. His account of the matter
to Kate was that he couldn't refuse--not being in a position, as yet,
to refuse anything; but that his being chosen for such an errand
confounded his sense of proportion. He was definite as to his scarce
knowing how to measure the honour, which