The great and obvious thing, as soon as she stood there on the occasion we have already named, was that she was now in high possession of it. This would have marked immediately the difference—had there been nothing else to do it—between their actual terms and their other terms, the character of their last encounter in Venice. That had been his idea, whereas her present step was her own; the few marks they had in common were, from the first moment, to his conscious vision, almost pathetically plain. She was as grave now as before; she looked around her, to hide it, as before; she pretended, as before, in an air in which her words at the moment itself fell flat, to an interest in the place and a curiosity about his "things"; there was a recall in the way in which, after she had failed a little to push up her veil symmetrically and he had said she had better take it off altogether, she had acceded to his suggestion before the glass. It was just these things that were vain; and what was real was that his fancy figured her after the first few minutes as literally now providing the element of reassurance which had previously been his care. It was she, supremely, who had the presence of mind. She made indeed for that matter very prompt use of it. "You see I've not hesitated this time to break your seal."
She had laid on the table from the moment of her coming in the long envelope, substantially filled, which he had sent her enclosed in another of still ampler make. He had however not looked at it—his belief being that he wished never again to do so; besides which it had happened to rest with its addressed side up. So he "saw" nothing, and it was only into her eyes that her remark made him look, declining any approach to the object indicated. "It's not 'my' seal, my dear; and my intention—which my note tried to express—was all to treat it to you as not mine."
"Do you mean that it's to that extent mine then?"
"Well, let us call it, if we like, theirs—that of the good people in New York, the authors of our communication. If the seal is broken well and good; but we might, you know," he presently added, "have sent it back to them intact and inviolate. Only accompanied," he smiled with his heart in his mouth, "by an absolutely kind letter."
Kate took it with the mere brave blink with which a patient of courage signifies to the exploring medical hand that the tender place is touched. He saw on the spot that she was prepared, and with this signal sign that she was too intelligent not to be, came a flicker of possibilities. She was—merely to put it at that—intelligent enough for anything. "Is it what you're proposing we should do?"
"Ah it's too late to do it—well, ideally. Now, with that sign that we know—!"
"But you don't know," she said very gently.
"I refer," he went on without noticing it, "to what would have been the handsome way. Its being dispatched again, with no cognisance taken but one's assurance of the highest consideration, and the proof of this in the state of the envelope—that would have been really satisfying."
She thought an instant. "The state of the envelope proving refusal, you mean, not to be based on the insufficiency of the sum?"
Densher smiled again as for the play, however whimsical, of her humour. "Well yes—something of that sort."
"So that if cognisance has been taken—so far as I'm concerned—it spoils the beauty?"
"It makes the difference that I'm disappointed in the hope—which I confess I entertained—that you'd bring the thing back to me as you had received it."
"You didn't express that hope in your letter."
"I didn't want to. I wanted to leave it to yourself. I wanted—oh yes, if that's what you wish to ask me—to see what you'd do."
"You wanted to measure the possibilities of my departure from delicacy?"
He continued steady now; a kind of ease—from the presence, as in the air, of something he couldn't yet have named—had come to him. "Well, I wanted—in so good a case—to test you."
She was struck—it showed in her face—by his expression. "It is a good case. I doubt whether a better," she said with her eyes on him, "has ever been known."
"The better the case then the better the test!"
"How do you know," she asked in reply to this, "what I'm capable of?"
"I don't, my dear! Only with the seal unbroken I should have known sooner."
"I see"—she took it in. "But I myself shouldn't have known at all. And you wouldn't have known, either, what I do know."
"Let me tell you at once," he returned, "that if you've been moved to correct my ignorance I very particularly request you not to."
She just hesitated. "Are you afraid of the effect of the corrections? Can you only do it by doing it blindly?"
He waited a moment. "What is it that you speak of my doing?"
"Why the only thing in the world that I take you as thinking of. Not accepting—what she has done. Isn't there some regular name in such cases? Not taking up the bequest."
"There's something you forget in it," he said after a moment. "My asking you to join with me in doing so."
Her wonder but made her softer, yet at the same time didn't make her less firm. "How can I 'join' in a matter with which I've nothing to do?"
"How? By a single word."
"And what word?"
"Your consent to my giving up."
"My consent has no meaning when I can't prevent you."
"You can perfectly prevent me. Understand that well," he said.
She seemed to face a threat in it. "You mean you won't give up if I don't consent?"
"Yes. I do nothing."
"That, as I understand, is accepting."
Densher paused. "I do nothing formal."
"You won't, I suppose you mean, touch the money."
"I won't touch the money."
It had a sound—though he had been coming to it—that made for gravity. "Who then in such an event will?"
"Any one who wants or who can."
Again a little she said nothing: she might say too much. But by the time she spoke he had covered ground. "How can I touch it but through you?"
"You can't. Any more," he added, "than I can renounce it except through you."
"Oh ever so much less! There's nothing," she explained, "in my power."
"I'm in your power," Merton Densher said.
"In what way?"
"In the way I show—and the way I've always shown. When have I shown," he asked as with a sudden cold impatience, "anything else? You surely must feel—so that you needn't wish to appear to spare me in it—how you 'have' me."
"It's very good of you, my dear," she nervously laughed, "to put me so thoroughly up to it!"
"I put you up to nothing. I didn't even put you up to the chance that, as I said a few moments ago, I saw for you in forwarding that thing. Your liberty is therefore in every way complete."
It had come to the point really that they showed each other pale faces, and that all the unspoken between them looked out of their eyes in a dim terror of their further conflict. Something even rose between them in one of their short silences—something that was like an appeal from each to the other not to be too true. Their necessity was somehow before them, but which of them must meet it first? "Thank you!" Kate said for his word about her freedom, but taking for the minute no further action on it. It was blest at least that all ironies failed them, and during another slow moment their very sense of it cleared the air.