t they had taken for a summer; the other, the
flower of the flock, a middy on the _Britannia,_ dreadfully drowned,
and not even by an accident at sea, but by cramp, unrescued, while
bathing, too late in the autumn, in a wretched little river during a
holiday visit to the home of a shipmate. Then Marian's unnatural
marriage, in itself a kind of spiritless turning of the other cheek to
fortune: her actual wretchedness and plaintiveness, her greasy
children, her impossible claims, her odious visitors--these things
completed the proof of the heaviness, for them all, of the hand of
fate. Kate confessedly described them with an excess of impatience; it
was much of her charm for Densher that she gave in general that turn to
her descriptions, partly as if to amuse him by free and humorous
colour, partly--and that charm was the greatest--as if to work off, for
her own relief, her constant perception of the incongruity of things.
She had seen the general show too early and too sharply, and she was so
intelligent that she knew it and allowed for that misfortune; therefore
when, in talk with him, she was violent and almost unfeminine, it was
almost as if they had settled, for intercourse, on the short cut of the
fantastic and the happy language of exaggeration. It had come to be
definite between them at a primary stage that, if they could have no
other straight way, the realm of thought at least was open to them.
They could think whatever they liked about whatever they would--or, in
other words, they could say it. Saying it for each other, for each
other alone, only of course added to the taste. The implication was
thereby constant that what they said when not together had no taste for
them at all, and nothing could have served more to launch them, at
special hours, on their small floating island than such an assumption
that they were only making believe everywhere else. Our young man, it
must be added, was conscious enough that it was Kate who profited most
by this particular play of the fact of intimacy. It always seemed to
him that she had more life than he to react from, and when she
recounted the dark disasters of her house and glanced at the hard, odd
offset of her present exaltation--since as exaltation it was apparently
to be considered--he felt his own grey domestic annals to make little
show. It was naturally, in all such reference, the question of her
father's character that engaged him most, but her picture of her
advent