The Sense of the Past

by Henry James

"Oh that's another matter—and when you look at me in a certain way—even when Perry does," he declared, though he could have bitten his lip the next moment for his "even"—"I'm more afraid of it than I ever was of anything in my life. I took your reminder to be for the limit of our pleasure together; though why," he demanded of Molly, "should we fall to speech of that when the article itself has scarcely so much as begun? I do enjoy you—I do, I do!"—and he showed, almost with vehemence, that he meant it for them all. "It's for that very reason I should have liked to be wholly right. But there I am again!" he laughed—"I can't keep off that strangeness of my momentary lapse, for though it was short it was sharp. However——!" And he beamed in resolute relief upon brave Molly.

"You can't keep off my everlasting little sister—that's what you can't keep off!" her bravery answered, though rather as to put it as helpfully as possible to his comprehension than to make a circumstance of her pretending to a jealousy that might or that mightn't become her. She struck him at that instant as not a little puzzled, and he had already felt how moving, in a person of her force, an unexpected patience would easily be. He had even for this one of those rarest reaches of apprehension on which he had been living and soaring for the past hour and which represented the joy he had just reasseverated; impatience was surely one of her bright marks, but he saw that to live with her would be to find her often deny it in ways unforeseen and that thus seemed for the moment to show themselves as the most delightful things in nature.

"Well, but it isn't she, it's my own stupidity where I ought particularly not to have been stupid." He replied with the good-humour which he desired to feel so much more than anything else, and would have explained further but that she cut him straight off—he did of a truth, in spite of everything, keep giving her such opportunities.

"Is what's so dreadfully the matter with you, pray, that if you had known there were two of us I'm exactly the one you wouldn't have preferred?—so that you took me in other words only because supposing there was nobody better!"

"There could be nobody better, love!" he promptly enough laughed—and yet somehow felt it a little weak for the absurd intensity of the question; since the case was really that, more and more desirable as she grew with every point she made, it did inwardly and inexpugnably beset him that the fine possession of truth on which he had been acting wasn't then so very fine if it left a secret humiliation possible. There was a word on his tongue that would help indeed to preserve the secrecy; which was stayed, however, by a prior word of Mrs. Midmore's.

"Does the younger girl, in America, cousin, push in for an establishment before her elders are properly settled?" The question, uttered with all kind coolness, referred itself, as he felt, to the perfect proprieties, yet nothing had so placed the speaker in the light of the manners surrounding them, and he couldn't have told why it was unanswerable save by his going into more things, and perhaps even meaner things, than he then could care for. He wasn't, was he? pledged to Molly, or she to him, through her being offered in the order of the proprieties; but his kinswoman, in spite of this, could easily have convinced him that his not taking her point would be low. For what was the old order in which he found himself so triumphantly, even so pantingly, float but a grand order? and what his having at some moments to breathe so hard but the very attestation of his equal strength? It was when he breathed hardest, he again recognised, that his throbs meant most to him; and he perhaps hadn't been so little at a loss for anything as now for the right humour and the right look. "It's everywhere easier, I suppose, to find a wife than to find a husband, but marrying, as in all new countries, I take it, proceeds so fast that you'd scarce notice by watching among us, in any company, who comes in first. Those who do that here," he developed at this high level of urbanity, "do it doubtless by a longer stretch than we ever have to show; but how shall I tell you what I mean by there not being perhaps so many there to come in last—or such a difference even, for that matter, between last and first? I dare say you wouldn't at once know many of 'em apart."

These were still for his audience wondrous explanations—they plainly required among the three some art of following; though the three, it was to be added, combined at moments, rather oddly, an appearance, a positive hush, of blankness, with the signified sufficiency of their own usual names for things. "We're not accustomed to think here that the last are as good as the first," Mrs. Midmore said, "and if you want to see the differences there can be between them I flatter myself we shall have plenty to show you. You must let me tell you too," she went on, "that now that I know you I don't believe a word of their all dancing in America to such a tune as yours, and I believe it exactly least when you argue in such a pretty way for it."

This appeared so to express her daughter's feeling too that Molly borrowed at once the fortunate word. "And his being a bachelor in spite of it, what's his argument for that, I should like to know! If it's so easy to marry there, and nobody can keep out of it, somebody ought to have caught you before poor me—though I'm sure I'm much obliged to all of those who failed."

"Ah, my dear, none of 'em quite 'failed'" Ralph laughed.

"'Quite, quite'?"—she echoed his amusement. "A miss is as good as a mile, and a girl either gets a husband or doesn't. Unless you mean"—she kept it up—"that though single you're engaged: to some other sweet creature, or perhaps to a dozen, as well as to me." And then while he felt himself exceed his smile as she blazed on him with this, "I don't hold a man single who drags about twenty hearts: he's no better than Bluebeard himself—unless found out in time."