THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
"Ah," said Kate, "the number doesn't matter. Three lines would be enough if you're sure you remember."
"I'm sure I remember. Besides," Densher continued, "I've seen her hand in other ways. I seem to recall how you once, before she went to Venice, showed me one of her notes precisely for that. And then she once copied me something."
"Oh," said Kate, almost with a smile, "I don't ask you for the detail of your reasons. One good one's enough." To which, however, she added, as if precisely not to speak with impatience or with any thing like irony: "And the writing has its usual look?"
Densher answered as if even to better that description of it. "It's beautiful."
"Yes—it was beautiful. Well," Kate, to defer to him still, further remarked, "it's not news to us now that she was stupendous. Anything's possible."
"Yes, anything's possible"—he appeared oddly to catch at it. "That's what I say to myself. It's what I've been seeing you," he a trifle vaguely explained, "as still more certain to feel."
She waited for him to say more, but he only, with his hands in his pockets, turned again away, going this time to the single window of the room, where, in the absence of lamplight, the blind had not been drawn. He looked out into the lamplit fog, lost himself in the small sordid London street—for
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