THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
from the recognition he had a few moments before partly confessed to. "I'm glad," she dropped, "you like him!"
There was something for him in the sound of it. "Well, I do no more, dear lady, than you do yourself. Surely you like him. Surely, when he was here, we all liked him."
"Yes, but I seem to feel I know what he thinks. And I should think, with all the time you spent with him, you would know it," she said, "yourself."
Densher stopped short, though at first without a word. "We never spoke of her. Neither of us mentioned her, even to sound her name, and nothing whatever, in connection with her, passed between us."
Mrs. Stringham stared up at him, surprised at this picture. But she had plainly an idea that, after an instant, resisted it. "That was his professional propriety."
"Precisely. But it was also my sense of that, and it was something more besides." And he spoke with sudden intensity. "I couldn't talk to him about her!"
"Oh!" said Susan Shepherd.
"I can't talk to any one about her."
"Except to me," his friend continued.
"Except to you." The ghost of her smile, a gleam of significance, had waited on her words, and it kept him, for honesty, looking at her. For honesty too—that is for his own words—he had quickly
305
