THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
he must meet with words that wouldn't destroy it. To destroy it was to destroy everything, to destroy probably Kate herself, to destroy in particular by a breach of faith still uglier than anything else, the beauty of their own last passage. He had given her his word of honour that if she would come to him he would act absolutely in her sense, and he had done so with a full enough vision of what her sense implied. What it implied, for one thing, was that, to night, in the great saloon, noble in its half-lighted beauty, and straight in the white face of his young hostess, divine in her trust, or at any rate inscrutable in her mercy—what it implied was that he should lie with his lips. The single thing, of all things, that could save him from it would be Milly's letting him off after having thus scared him. What made her mercy inscrutable was that if she had already more than once saved him it was yet apparently without knowing how nearly he was lost.
These were transcendent motions, not the less blessed for being obscure; whereby, yet once more, he was to feel the pressure lighten. He was kept on his feet, in short, by the felicity of her not presenting him with Kate's version as a version to adopt. He couldn't stand up to lie—he felt as if he would have to go down on his knees. As it was he just sat there shaking a little for nervousness the leg he had crossed over the other. She was sorry for his snub, but he had nothing more to subscribe to, to perjure himself about, than the three or four inanities he
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