This struck him as obscure. "How does she know me but as part and parcel of you?" 

 "How?" Kate triumphantly asked. "Why exactly to make nothing of it, to have nothing to do with it, to stick consistently to her line about it. Aunt Maud's line is to keep all reality out of our relation—that is out of my being in danger from you—by not having so much as suspected or heard of it. She'll get rid of it, as she believes, by ignoring it and sinking it—if she only does so hard enough. Therefore she, in her manner, 'denies' it if you will. That's how she knows you otherwise than as part and parcel of me. She won't for a moment have allowed either to Mrs. Stringham or to Milly that I've in any way, as they say, distinguished you." 

 "And you don't suppose," said Densher, "that they must have made it out for themselves?" 

 "No, my dear, I don't; not even," Kate declared, "after Milly's so funnily bumping against us on Tuesday." 

 "She doesn't see from that—?" 

 "That you're, so to speak, mad about me. Yes, she sees, no doubt, that you regard me with a complacent eye—for you show it, I think, always too much and too crudely. But nothing beyond that. I don't show it too much; I don't perhaps—to please you completely where others are concerned—show it enough." 

 "Can you show it or not as you like?" Densher demanded. 

 It pulled her up a little, but she came out resplendent. "Not where you are concerned. Beyond seeing that you're rather gone," she went on, "Milly only sees that I'm decently good to you." 

 "Very good indeed she must think it!" 

 "Very good indeed then. She easily sees me," Kate smiled, "as very good indeed." 

 The young man brooded. "But in a sense to take some explaining." 

 "Then I explain." She was really fine; it came back to her essential plea for her freedom of action and his beauty of trust. "I mean," she added, "I will explain." 

 "And what will I do?" 

 "Recognise the difference it must make if she thinks." But here in truth Kate faltered. It was his silence alone that, for the moment, took up her apparent meaning; and before he again spoke she had returned to remembrance and prudence. They were now not to forget that, Aunt Maud's liberality 

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