79Henry Jamesmy having a certain am

79
Henry James
my having a certain amount of delicacy, in my wishing to
better my state before I put the pistol to your head in
respect to sharing it. The time this will take figures for
her as the time that will help her if she doesn’t spoil her
chance by treating me badly. She doesn’t at all wish moreover,”
Densher went on, “to treat me badly, for I believe,
upon my honour, odd as it may sound to you, that she
personally rather likes me and that if you weren’t in question
I might almost become her pet young man. She doesn’t
disparage intellect and culture—quite the contrary; she
wants them to adorn her board and be associated with her
name; and I’m sure it has sometimes cost her a real pang
that I should be so desirable, at once, and so impossible.”
He paused a moment, and his companion then saw how
strange a smile was in his face—a smile as strange even as
the adjunct in her own of this informing vision. “I quite
suspect her of believing that, if the truth were known,
she likes me literally better than—deep down—you yourself
do: wherefore she does me the honour to think I may
be safely left to kill my own cause. There, as I say, comes
in her margin. I’m not the sort of stuff of romance that
wears, that washes, that survives use, that resists familiarity.
Once in any degree admit that, and your pride and
prejudice will take care of the rest!—the pride fed full,
meanwhile, by the system she means to practise with you,
and the prejudice excited by the comparisons she’ll enable
you to make, from which I shall come off badly. She likes
me, but she’ll never like me so much as when she has
succeeded a little better in making me look wretched. For
then you’ll like me less.”
Kate showed for this evocation a due interest, but no
alarm; and it was a little as if to pay his tender cynicism
back in kind that she after an instant replied: “I see, I
see—what an immense affair she must think me! One was
aware, but you deepen the impression.”
“I think you’ll make no mistake,” said Densher, “in letting
it go as deep as it will.”
He had given her indeed, she made no scruple of showing,
plenty to amuse herself with. “Her facing the music,
her making you boldly as welcome as you say—that’s an
awfully big theory, you know, and worthy of all the other
big things that in one’s acquaintance with people give her