THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
veniences. The type was so elastic that it could be stretched to almost anything; and yet, not stretched, it kept down, remained normal, remained properly within bounds. And he had meanwhile, thank goodness, without being too much disconcerted, the sense, for the girl's part of the business, of the queerest conscious compliance, of her doing very much what he wanted, even though without her quite seeing why. She fairly touched this once in saying: "Oh yes, you like us to be as we are because it's a kind of facility to you that we don't quite measure: I think one would have to be English to measure it!"—and that too, strangely enough, without prejudice to her good nature. She might have been conceived as doing—that is of being—what he liked, if only to judge where it would take them. They really, as it went on, saw each other at the game; she knowing he tried to keep her in tune with his notion, and he knowing she thus knew it. Add that he, again, knew she knew, and yet that nothing was spoiled by it, and we get a fair impression of their most completely workable line. The strangest fact of all for us must be that the success he himself thus promoted was precisely what figured, to his gratitude, as the something above and beyond him, above and beyond Kate, that made for daily decency. There would scarce have been felicity—certainly too little of the right lubricant—had not the national character so invoked been, not less inscrutably than completely, in Milly's chords. It made her unity and was
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