The Wings of the Dove quotes

This whole vision was the worst thing yet—as including, in particular, the interview for which she had prepared herself; and for what had she come but for the worst?

She tried to be sad, so as not to be angry; but it made her angry that she couldn’t be sad.

And yet where was misery, misery too beaten for blame and chalk-marked by fate like a “lot” at a common auction, if not in these merciless signs of mere mean, stale feelings?

a circumstance moreover playing its part at almost any time in the impression she produced. The impression was one that remained, but as regards the sources of it no sum in addition would have made up the total.

She had stature without height, grace without motion, presence without mass.

Slender and simple, frequently soundless, she was somehow always in the line of the eye—she counted singularly for its pleasure.

This was the weariness of every fresh meeting; he dealt out lies as he might the cards from the greasy old pack for the game of diplomacy to which you were to sit down with him.

The inconvenience⁠—as always happens in such cases⁠—was not that you minded what was false, but that you missed what was true.

He might be ill, and it might suit you to know it, but no contact with him, for this, could ever be straight enough.

Life had met him so, halfway, and had turned round so to walk with him, placing a hand in his arm and fondly leaving him to choose the pace.

Those who knew him a little said, “How he does dress!”⁠—those who knew him better said, “How does he?”

The one stray gleam of comedy just now in his daughter’s eyes was the funny feeling he momentarily made her have of being herself “looked up” by him in sordid lodgings.

“Oh dear, no; not at all. That’s no part of the question. If I haven’t understood you by this time, I never shall, and it doesn’t matter.

It has seemed to me that you may be lived with, but not that you may be understood.

Of course I’ve not the least idea how you get on.”

“We’re not possessed of so much, at this charming pass, please to remember, as that we can afford not to take hold of any perch held out to us. I like the way you talk, my dear, about ‘giving up!’

One doesn’t give up the use of a spoon because one’s reduced to living on broth.

And your spoon, that is your aunt, please consider, is partly mine as well.”

the moral of which moreover, of course, was that the more one gave oneself the less of one was left. There were always people to snatch at one, and it would never occur to them that they were eating one up.

They did that without tasting.

There was no such misfortune, or at any rate no such discomfort, she further reasoned, as to be formed at once for being and for seeing.

There were always people to snatch at one, and it would never occur to them that they were eating one up. They did that without tasting.

There was no such misfortune, or at any rate no such discomfort, she further reasoned, as to be formed at once for being and for seeing.

You always saw, in this case, something else than what you were, and you got, in consequence, none of the peace of your condition.

The beauty of which, too, was that Marian didn’t love them. But they were Condrips—they had grown near the rose; they were almost like Bertie and Maudie, like Kitty and Guy.

They talked of the dead to her, which Kate never did; it being a relation in which Kate could but mutely listen.

She couldn’t indeed too often say to herself that if that was what marriage did to you—! It may easily be guessed, therefore, that the ironic light of such reserves fell straight across the field of Marian’s warning.

yet, though to that degree neither extraordinary nor abnormal, he would have failed to play straight into an observer’s hands.

He was young for the House of Commons, he was loose for the army.

He was refined, as might have been said, for the city, and, quite apart from the cut of his cloth, he was sceptical, it might have been felt, for the church.

You would have got fairly near him by making out in his eyes the potential recognition of ideas; but you would have quite fallen away again on the question of the ideas themselves.

The difficulty with Densher was that he looked vague without looking weak⁠—idle without looking empty.

It was the accident, possibly, of his long legs, which were apt to stretch themselves;

She had had originally her full apprehension of his coerced, certainly of his vague, condition—full apprehensions often being with her immediate; then she had had her equal consciousness that, within five minutes, something between them had—well, she couldn’t call it anything but come.

It was nothing, but it was somehow everything⁠—it was that something for each of them had happened.

They had found themselves looking at each other straight, and for a longer time on end than was usual even at parties in galleries; but that, after all, would have been a small affair, if there hadn’t been something else with it.

so that a singular thing had afterwards happened. They had accepted their acquaintance as too short for an engagement, but they had treated it as long enough for almost anything else, and marriage was somehow before them like a temple without an avenue.

They belonged to the temple and they met in the grounds; they were in the stage at which grounds in general offered much scattered refreshment.

But Kate had meanwhile had so few confidants that she wondered at the source of her father’s suspicions. The diffusion of rumour was of course always remarkable in London, and for Marian not less—as Aunt Maud touched neither directly—the mystery had worked.

“Oh, I quite conceive,” said Densher, “that your idea of the best isn’t me.”

It was an oddity of Mrs. Lowder’s that her face in speech was like a lighted window at night, but that silence immediately drew the curtain.

The occasion for reply allowed by her silence was never easy to take; yet she was still less easy to interrupt. The great glaze of her surface, at all events, gave her visitor no present help.

Suddenly she said to him with extraordinary beauty:

“I engage myself to you forever.”

The beauty was in everything, and he could have separated nothing—couldn’t have thought of her face as distinct from the whole joy. Yet her face had a new light. “And I pledge you—I call God to witness!—every spark of my faith;

This was one of the speeches, frequent in her, that, liberally, joyfully, intensely adopted and, in itself, as might be, embraced, drew him again as close to her, and held him as long, as their conditions permitted.

“Then that’s exactly why we’ve such an abysmal need of you!”

This was her own way of describing a face that, thanks, doubtless, to rather too much forehead, too much nose and too much mouth, together with too little mere conventional colour and conventional line, was expressive, irregular, exquisite, both for speech and for silence.

When Milly smiled it was a public event⁠—when she didn’t it was a chapter of history.

They had stopped, on the Brünig, for luncheon, and there had come up for them under the charm of the place the question of a longer stay.

She couldn’t dress it away, nor walk it away, nor read it away, nor think it away; she could neither smile it away in any dreamy absence nor blow it away in any softened sigh.

She couldn’t have lost it if she had tried⁠—that was what it was to be really rich.

It had to be the thing you were. When at the end of an hour she had not returned to the house Mrs.

Milly waited another moment; then she found it, and found for it a dim show of joy.

“The power to resist the bliss of what I have!”

Mrs. Stringham took it in—her sense of being “put off” with it, the possible, probable irony of it—and her tenderness renewed itself in the positive grimness of a long murmur.

“She’ll get back,” he pleasantly said, “her money.” He could say it too—which was singular—without affecting her either as vulgar or as “nasty”; and he had soon explained himself by adding:

“Nobody here, you know, does anything for nothing.”

“Ah, if you mean that we shall reward her as hard as ever we can, nothing is more certain. But she’s an idealist,” Milly continued, “and idealists, in the long run, I think, don’t feel that they lose.”

Milly thought, and it was perhaps the very truth of his claim—its not being negligible—that sharpened her impatience and thereby her wit.

“You’re blasé, but you’re not enlightened. You’re familiar with everything, but conscious, really of nothing. What I mean is that you’ve no imagination.”

Lord Mark, at this, threw back his head, ranging with his eyes the opposite side of the room and showing himself at last so much more completely as diverted that it fairly attracted their hostess’s notice. Mrs.

Susie had an intense thought and then an effusion. “My dear child, we move in a labyrinth.”

“Of course we do. That’s just the fun of it!” said Milly with a strange gaiety. Then she added: “Don’t tell me that⁠—in this for instance⁠—there are not abysses. I want abysses.”

Her friend looked at her—it was not unfrequently the case—a little harder than the surface of the occasion seemed to require;

It was, oddly enough, an idea Milly seemed half to accept.

“I don’t know what I want to run away from!”

It dispelled, on the spot—something, to the elder woman’s ear, in the sad, sweet sound of it—any ghost of any need of explaining.

And she was dead, dead, dead. Milly recognised her exactly in words that had nothing to do with her.

“I shall never be better than this.”

He smiled for her at the portrait. “Than she? You’d scarce need to be better, for surely that’s well enough. But you are, one feels, as it happens, better; because, splendid as she is, one doubts if she was good.”

She looked at him longer. “No, that’s too good. Shall I, at any rate, suffer?”

“My dear young lady,” said her distinguished friend, “isn’t to ‘live’ exactly what I’m trying to persuade you to take the trouble to do?”

It had been at this point, however, that Kate flickered highest.

“Oh, you may very well loathe me yet!”

Really at last, thus, it had been too much; as, with her own least feeble flare, after a wondering watch, Milly had shown. She hadn’t cared; she had too much wanted to know;

She met it on the instant as she would have met the revealed truth; it lighted up the strange dusk in which she lately had walked. That was what was the matter with her.

She was a dove. Oh, wasn’t she?

—it echoed within her as she became aware of the sound, outside, of the return of their friends. There was, the next thing, little enough doubt about it after Aunt Maud had been two minutes in the room. She had come up, Mrs.

She had risen as she spoke, and Kate had stopped before her, shining at her instantly with a softer brightness. Poor Milly hereby enjoyed one of her views of how people, wincing oddly, were often touched by her.

“Because you’re a dove.”

With which she felt herself ever so delicately, so considerately, embraced; not with familiarity or as a liberty taken, but almost ceremonially and in the manner of an accolade;

It gave her straightway the measure of the success she could have as a dove: that was recorded in the long look of deep criticism, a look without a word, that Mrs. Lowder poured forth. And the word, presently, bettered it still.

“Oh, you exquisite thing!”

The luscious innuendo of it, almost startling, lingered in the room, after the visitors had gone, like an oversweet fragrance. But left alone with Mrs. Stringham Milly continued to breathe it:

Even ‘society’ won’t know how good for it you are; it’s too stupid, and you’re beyond it. You’d have to pull it uphill—it’s you yourself who are at the top.

The women one meets⁠—what are they but books one has already read? You’re a whole library of the unknown, the uncut.

” He almost moaned, he ached, from the depth of his content. “Upon my word I’ve a subscription!”

It had been, however, as if the thrill of their association itself pressed in him, as great felicities do, the sharp spring of fear. “See here, you know: don’t, don’t—!”

“Don’t fail me. It would kill me.”

She looked at him a minute with no response but her eyes. “So you think you’ll kill me in time to prevent it?” She smiled, but he saw her the next instant as smiling through tears;

“Have you never, dearest, been in love?” Susan Shepherd enquired.

“Yes, my child; but not by the doctor’s direction.”

Maud Manningham had spoken perforce with a break into momentary mirth, which operated—and happily too—as a challenge to her visitor’s spirit. “Oh of course we don’t ask his leave to fall. But it’s something to know he thinks it good for us.”

“Well, it’s one way. He’s not good enough for my niece, and he’s not good enough for you.

One’s an aunt, one’s a wretch and one’s a fool.

”

Milly’s assent to which, after an instant, gave her the last word.

“No, so that people can take anything from me.”

And what Mrs. Stringham did indeed resignedly take after this was the absence on her part of any account of the visit then paid.

“One has to be so bad for it?”

“Well, I don’t think I’ve ever come to it⁠—to ‘ease’ of treatment. I doubt if it’s possible. I’ve not, if it is, found anyone bad enough. The ease, you see, is for you.”

They had an odd friendly, but perhaps the least bit awkward pause on it; after which Sir Luke asked: “And that clever lady—she goes with you?”

He considered her as if at this point she a little tried his patience.

“You’re the least ‘dreary’ woman I’ve ever, ever seen. Ever, do you know? There’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a really splendid life.”

“So everyone tells me,” she promptly returned.

“Oh you’ll get away from me.”

“Keep me, keep me,” she simply continued with her gentle eyes on him.

She had given him her hand for goodbye, and he thus for a moment did keep her. Something then, while he seemed to think if there were anything more, came back to him; though something of which there wasn’t too much to be made.

“Neither should I if I had your luck. Still, with that luck, for one’s all—! Should you positively like to live here?”

“I think I should like,” said poor Milly after an instant, “to die here.”

Which made him, precisely, laugh. That was what she wanted—when a person did care: it was the pleasant human way, without depths of darkness. “Oh it’s not good enough for that! That requires picking. But can’t you keep it?

“Ah then you will be alive,” said Lord Mark.

“Well, not quite extinct perhaps, but shrunken, wasted, wizened; rattling about here like the dried kernel of a nut.”

“Oh,” Lord Mark returned, “we, much as you mistrust us, can do better for you than that.”

Then, incoherently and still more suddenly, recklessly moreover, since they now might easily, from under the arcades, be observed, he passed his hand into her arm with a force that produced for them another pause.

“I’ll tell any lie you want, any your idea requires, if you’ll only come to me.”

She spoke low, but there was somehow, for his uncertainty, a wonder in her being so equal to him. “To my rooms, which are perfectly possible, and in taking which, the other day, I had you, as you must have felt, in view.

the long, priceless chain, wound twice round the neck, hung, heavy and pure, down the front of the wearer’s breast—so far down that Milly’s trick, evidently unconscious, of holding and vaguely fingering and entwining a part of it, conduced presumably to convenience.

“She’s a dove,” Kate went on, “and one somehow doesn’t think of doves as bejewelled. Yet they suit her down to the ground.”

“Yes—down to the ground is the word.” Densher saw now how they suited her, but was perhaps still more aware of something intense in his companion’s feeling about them. Milly was indeed a dove; this was the figure, though it most applied to her spirit.

It made her keep her eyes on him, and he could thus see that, by one of those incalculable motions in her without which she wouldn’t have been a quarter so interesting, they half-filled with tears from some source he had too roughly touched.

“I’m taking a trouble for you I never dreamed I should take for any human creature.”

Oh it went home, making him flush for it; yet he soon enough felt his reply on his lips. “Well, isn’t my whole insistence to you now that I can conjure trouble away?” And he let it, his insistence, come out again;

He had quite, within the minute, been turning names over; and there was only one, which at last stared at him there dreadful, that properly fitted.

“Since she’s to die I’m to marry her?”

It struck him even at the moment as fine in her that she met it with no wincing nor mincing. She might for the grace of silence, for favour to their conditions, have only answered him with her eyes. But her lips bravely moved.

She might for the grace of silence, for favour to their conditions, have only answered him with her eyes. But her lips bravely moved. “To marry her.”

“So that when her death has taken place I shall in the natural course have money?”

It was before him enough now, and he had nothing more to ask; he had only to turn, on the spot, considerably cold with the thought that all along—to his stupidity, his timidity—it had been, it had been only, what she meant.

Now that he was in possession moreover she couldn’t forbear, strangely enough, to pronounce the words she hadn’t pronounced: they broke through her controlled and colourless voice as if she should be ashamed, to the very end, to have flinched.

“You’ll in the natural course have money. We shall in the natural course be free.”

“Oh, oh, oh!” Densher softly murmured.

“Your descriptions”—her “ideal” was such a touch!—“are prodigious. And what I don’t make out is how, caring for me, you can like it.”

“I don’t like it, but I’m a person, thank goodness, who can do what I don’t like.”

It wasn’t till afterwards that, going back to it, he was to read into this speech a kind of heroic ring, a note of character that belittled his own incapacity for action.

At the time too, moreover, he next reflected that he after all knew what he did. But something else on his lips was uppermost. “What I don’t make out then is how you can even bear it.”

“Well, when you know me better you’ll find out how much I can bear.”

And she went on before he could take up, as it were, her too many implications.

“Oh,” said Densher with more light, “you mean you haven’t spoken about me?”

“About what else? No more than if you were dead.”

“Well,” he answered after a moment, “I am dead.”

“About what else? No more than if you were dead.”

“Well,” he answered after a moment, “I am dead.”

“Then I am,” said Susan Shepherd with a drop of her arms on her waterproof.

They had parted four days earlier with many things, between them, deep down. But these things were now on their troubled surface, and it wasn’t he who had brought them so quickly up.

Women were wonderful⁠—at least this one was.

But so, not less, was Milly, was Aunt Maud; so, most of all, was his very Kate. Well, he already knew what he had been feeling about the circle of petticoats. They were all such petticoats! It was just the fineness of his tangle.

but he had also, with everyone else, as he now felt, actively fostered suppressions which were in the direct interest of everyone’s good manner, everyone’s pity, everyone’s really quite generous ideal.

It was a conspiracy of silence, as the cliché went, to which no one had made an exception, the great smudge of mortality across the picture, the shadow of pain and horror, finding in no quarter a surface of spirit or of speech that consented to reflect it.

“The mere aesthetic instinct of mankind—!” our young man had more than once, in the connection, said to himself; letting the rest of the proposition drop, but touching again thus sufficiently on the outrage even to taste involved in one’s having to see.

He watched her take it in—it so added to her sombre beauty. Then he spoke as Mrs. Stringham had spoken.

“She turned her face to the wall.”

Slight as it was, her beauty somehow gave it style; so that he continued consistently: “She learned it, you see, too soon—since of course one’s idea had been that she might never even learn it at all.

He raised his eyes to her. “Is that peace?”

“Of having been loved,” she went on. “That is. Of having,” she wound up, “realised her passion. She wanted nothing more. She has had all she wanted.”

Lucid and always grave, she gave this out with a beautiful authority that he could for the time meet with no words.

He could practically deny in such conditions nothing that she said, and what she said was, with it, visibly, a fruit of that knowledge. “We’ve succeeded.” She spoke with her eyes deep in his own.

“She won’t have loved you for nothing.” It made him wince, but she insisted. “And you won’t have loved me.”

He knew so well what she meant, and so equally with it what he “had had” no less than what he hadn’t, that, with but the smallest hesitation, he strained the point. “Yes—my message.”

“Our dear dove then, as Kate calls her, has folded her wonderful wings.”

It rather racked him, but he tried to receive it as she intended, and she evidently took his formal assent for self-control. “Unless it’s more true,” she accordingly added, “that she has spread them the wider.”

It rather racked him, but he tried to receive it as she intended, and she evidently took his formal assent for self-control.

“Unless it’s more true,” she accordingly added, “that she has spread them the wider.”

He again but formally assented, though, strangely enough, the words fitted a figure deep in his own imagination. “Rather, yes—spread them the wider.”

It didn’t match his own day, but it was much less of a discord than some other things actual and possible.

The Oratory in short, to make him right, would do.