rk. That
had held her from the moment of their leaving the museum; it kept her
company through their drive and during luncheon; and now that she was a
quarter of an hour alone with him it became acute. She was to feel at
this crisis that no clear, no common answer, no direct satisfaction on
this point, was to reach her; she was to see her question itself simply
go to pieces. She couldn't tell if he were different or not, and she
didn't know nor care if _she_ were: these things had ceased to matter
in the light of the only thing she did know. This was that she liked
him, as she put it to herself, as much as ever; and if that were to
amount to liking a new person the amusement would be but the greater.
She had thought him at first very quiet, in spite of recovery from his
original confusion; though even the shade of bewilderment, she yet
perceived, had not been due to such vagueness on the subject of her
reintensified identity as the probable sight, over there, of many
thousands of her kind would sufficiently have justified. No, he was
quiet, inevitably, for the first half of the time, because Milly's own
lively line--the line of spontaneity--made everything else relative;
and because too, so far as Kate was spontaneous, it was ever so finely
in the air among them that the normal pitch must be kept. Afterwards,
when they had got a little more used, as it were, to each other's
separate felicity, he had begun to talk more, clearly bethought
himself, at a given moment, of what _his_ natural lively line would be.
It would be to take for granted she must wish to hear of the States,
and to give her, in its order, everything he had seen and done there.
He abounded, of a sudden he almost insisted; he returned, after breaks,
to the charge; and the effect was perhaps the more odd as he gave no
clue whatever to what he had admired, as he went, or to what he hadn't.
He simply drenched her with his sociable story--especially during the
time they were away from the others. She had stopped then being
American--all to let him be English; a permission of which he took, she
could feel, both immense and unconscious advantage. She had really
never cared less for the "States" than at this moment; but that had
nothing to do with the matter. It would have been the occasion of her
life to learn about them, for nothing could put him off, and he
ventured on no reference to what had happened for herself. It might
have been almost as if he had known