fine things, a part of life. Oh she has you arranged!" "You have, it strikes me, my dear"—and he looked both detached and rueful. "Pray what am I to do with the dukes?" "Oh the dukes will be disappointed!" "Then why shan't I be?" "You'll have expected less," Kate wonderfully smiled. "Besides, you will be. You'll have expected enough for that." "Yet it's what you want to let me in for?" "I want," said the girl, "to make things pleasant for her. I use, for the purpose, what I have. You're what I have of most precious, and you're therefore what I use most." He looked at her long. "I wish I could use you a little more." After which, as she continued to smile at him, "Is it a bad case of lungs?" he asked. Kate showed for a little as if she wished it might be. "Not lungs, I think. Isn't consumption, taken in time, now curable?" "People are, no doubt, patched up." But he wondered. "Do you mean she has something that's past patching?" And before she could answer: "It's really as if her appearance put her outside of such things—being, in spite of her youth, that of a person who has been through all it's conceivable she should be exposed to. She affects one, I should say, as a creature saved from a shipwreck. Such a creature may surely, in these days, on the doctrine of chances, go to sea again with confidence. She has had her wreck—she has met her adventure." "Oh I grant you her wreck!"—Kate was all response so far. "But do let her have still her adventure. There are wrecks that are not adventures." "Well—if there be also adventures that are not wrecks!" Densher in short was willing, but he came back to his point. "What I mean is that she has none of the effect—on one's nerves or whatever—of an invalid." Kate on her side did this justice. "No—that's the beauty of her." "The beauty—?" "Yes, she's so wonderful. She won't show for that, any more than your watch, when it's about to stop for want of being wound up, gives you convenient notice or shows as different from
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