it, would be worthy of high commemoration;
Densher's perception went out to meet the young
woman's and quite kept pace with her own recog
nition. Having so often concluded on the fact of
his weakness, as he called it, for life his strength
merely for thought life, he logically opined, was
what he must somehow arrange to annex and pos
sess. This was so much a necessity that thought
by itself only went on in the void; it was from
the immediate air of life that it must draw its breath.
So the young man, ingenius but large, critical but
ardent too, made out both his case and Kate Croy s.
They had originally met before her mother's death
an occasion marked for her as the last pleasure
permitted by the approach of that event; after
which the dark months had interposed a screen and,
for all Kate knew, made the end one with the be
ginning.

The beginning to which she often went back
had been a scene, for our young woman, of supreme
brilliancy; a party given at a " gallery " hired by a
hostess who fished with big nets. A Spanish
dancer, understood to be at that moment the de
light of the town, an American reciter, the joy of
a kindred people, an Hungarian fiddler, the won
der of the world at large in the name of these and
other attractions the company in which, by a rare
privilege, Kate found herself had been freely con
voked. She lived under her mother's roof, as she
considered, obscurely, and was acquainted with few

[[58]]

p057 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p058w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p059

v?