THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
"You want to be adored." It came at last straight. "Nothing would worry you less. I mean as I shall do it. It is so"—he firmly kept it up. "You're not loved enough."
"Enough for what, Lord Mark?"
"Why, to get the full good of it."
Well, she didn't after all moek at him. "I see what you mean. That full good of it which consists in finding one's self forced to love in return." She had grasped it, but she hesitated. "Your idea is that I might find myself forced to love you?"
"Oh, 'forced'———!" He was so fine and so expert, so awake to anything the least ridiculous, and of a type with which the preaching of passion somehow so ill consorted—he was so much all these things that he had absolutely to take account of them himself. And he did so, in a single intonation, beautifully. Milly liked him again, liked him for such shades as that, liked him so that it was woeful to see him spoiling it, and still more woeful to have to rank him among those minor charms of existence that she gasped, at moments, to remember she must give up. "Is it inconceivable to you that you might try?"
"To be so favourably affected by you———?"
"To believe in me. To believe in me," Lord Mark repeated.
Again she hesitated. "To 'try' in return for your trying?"
172
