Wings of the Dove (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) by Henry James Read Free Book Online Page B

God they didn’t really know!—that he had done. He had positively been, in his way, by the force of his particular type, a terrible husband not to live with; this type reflecting so invidiously on the woman who had found him distasteful. Had this thereby not kept directly present to Kate herself that it might, on some sides, prove no light thing for her to leave uncompanion’d a parent with such a face and such a manner? Yet if there was much she neither knew nor dreamed of it passed between them at this very moment that he was quite familiar with himself as the subject of such quandaries. If he recognised his younger daughter’s happy aspect as a tangible value, he had from the first still more exactly appraised every point of his own. The great wonder was not that in spite of everything these points had helped him; the great wonder was that they hadn’t helped him more. However, it was, to its eternal recurrent tune, helping him all the while; her drop into patience with him showed how it was helping him at this moment. She saw the next instant precisely the line he would take. “Do you really ask me to believe you’ve been making up your mind to that?”
    She had to consider her own line. “I don’t think I care, papa, what you believe. I never, for that matter, think of you as believing anything; hardly more,” she permitted herself to add, “than I ever think of you as yourself believed. I don’t know you, father, you see.”
    “And it’s your idea that you may make that up?”
    “Oh dear, no; not at all. That’s no part of the question. If I haven’t understood you by this time I never shall, and it doesn’t matter. It has seemed to me you may be lived with, but not that you may be understood. Of course I’ve not the least idea how you get on.”
    “I don’t get on,” Mr. Croy almost gaily replied.
    His daughter took the place in again, and it might well have seemed odd that with so little to meet the eye there should be so much to show. What showed was the ugliness—so positive and palpable that it was somehow sustaining. It was a medium, a setting, and to that extent, after all, a dreadful sign of life; so that it fairly gave point to her answer. “Oh I beg your pardon. You flourish.”
    “Do you throw it up at me again,” he pleasantly put to her, “that I’ve not made away with myself?”
    She treated the question as needing no reply; she sat there for real things. “You know how all our anxieties, under mamma’s will, have Come out. She had still less to leave than she feared. We don’t know how we lived. It all makes up about two hundred a year for Marian, and two for me, but I give up a hundred to Marian.”
    “Oh you weak thing!” her father sighed as from depths of enlightened experience.
    “For you and me together,” she went on, “the other hundred would do something.”
    “And what would do the rest?”
    “Can you yourself do nothing?”
    He gave her a look; then, slipping his hands into his pockets and turning away, stood for a little at the window she had left open. She said nothing more—she had placed him there with that question, and the silence lasted a minute, broken by the call of an appealing costermonger, which came in with the mild March air, with the shabby sunshine, fearfully unbecoming to the room, and with the small homely hum of Chirk Street. Presently he moved nearer, but as if her question had quite dropped. “I don’t see what has so suddenly wound you up.”
    “I should have thought you might perhaps guess. Let me at any rate tell you. Aunt Maud has made me a proposal. But she has also made me a condition. She wants to keep me.”
    “And what in the world else could she possibly want?”
    “Oh I don’t know—many things. I’m not so precious a capture,” the girl a little dryly explained. “No one has ever wanted to keep me before.”
    Looking always what was proper, her father looked now still more surprised than interested. “You’ve