"Don't care for Lord Mark." 

 "Oh!" Densher answered with a sound like his lordship's own. To which he added: "You absolutely hold that that poor girl doesn't?" 

 "Ah you know what I hold about that poor girl!" It had made her again impatient. 

 Yet he stuck a minute to the subject. "You scarcely call him, I suppose, one of the dukes." 

 "Mercy, no—far from it. He's not, compared with other possibilities, 'in' it. Milly, it's true," she said, to be exact, "has no natural sense of social values, doesn't in the least understand our differences or know who's who or what's what." 

 "I see. That," Densher laughed, "is her reason for liking me." 

 "Precisely. She doesn't resemble me," said Kate, "who at least know what I lose." 

 Well, it had all risen for Densher to a considerable interest. "And Aunt Maud—why shouldn't she know? I mean that your friend there isn't really anything. Does she suppose him of ducal value?" 

 "Scarcely; save in the sense of being uncle to a duke. That's undeniably something. He's the best moreover we can get." 

 "Oh, oh!" said Densher; and his doubt was not all derisive. 

 "It isn't Lord Mark's grandeur," she went on without heeding this; "because perhaps in the line of that alone—as he has no money—more could be done. But she's not a bit sordid; she only counts with the sordidness of others. Besides, he's grand enough, with a duke in his family and at the other end of the string. The thing's his genius." 

 "And do you believe in that?" 

 "In Lord Mark's genius?" Kate, as if for a more final opinion than had yet been asked of her, took a moment to think. She balanced indeed so that one would scarce have known what to expect; but she came out in time with a very sufficient "Yes!" 

 "Political?" 

 "Universal. I don't know at least," she said, "what else to call it when a man's able to make himself without effort, without violence, without machinery of any sort, so intensely felt. He has somehow an effect without his being in any traceable way a cause." 

 "Ah but if the effect," said Densher with conscious superficiality, 

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