been exposed to initiations
ineffaceable. Something had happened to him that could never be undone.

When Kate Croy said to him as much he besought her not to insist,
declaring that this indeed was what was too much the matter with him,
that he had been but too probably spoiled for native, for insular use.
On which, not unnaturally, she insisted the more, assuring him, without
mitigation, that if he was complicated and brilliant she wouldn't for
the world have had him any thing less; so that he was reduced in the
end to accusing her of putting the dreadful truth to him in the hollow
guise of flattery. She was making out how abnormal he was in order that
she might eventually find him impossible; and, as she could fully make
it out but with his aid, she had to bribe him by feigned delight to
help her. If her last word for him, in the connection, was that the way
he saw himself was just a precious proof the more of his having tasted
of the tree and being thereby prepared to assist her to eat, this gives
the happy tone of their whole talk, the measure of the flight of time
in the near presence of his settled departure. Kate showed, however,
that she was to be more literally taken when she spoke of the relief
Aunt Maud would draw from the prospect of his absence.

"Yet one can scarcely see why," he replied, "when she fears me so
little."

His friend weighed his objection. "Your idea is that she likes you so
much that she'll even go so far as to regret losing you?"

Well, he saw it in their constant comprehensive way. "Since what she
builds on is the gradual process of your alienation, she may take the
view that the process constantly requires me. Mustn't I be there to
keep it going? It's in my exile that it may languish."

He went on with that fantasy, but at this point Kate ceased to attend.
He saw after a little that she had been following some thought of her
own, and he had been feeling the growth of something determinant even
through the extravagance of much of the pleasantry, the warm,
transparent irony, into which their livelier intimacy kept plunging
like a confident swimmer. Suddenly she said to him with extraordinary
beauty: "I engage myself to you for ever."

The beauty was in everything, and he could have separated
nothing--couldn't have thought of her face as distinct from the whole
joy. Yet her face had a new light. "And I pledge you--I call God to
witness!--every spark of my faith; I give you every drop