The Wings of the Dove, Volume I. Генри Джеймс

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      "Let us wait to arrange it," Kate presently replied, "till after you've seen her."

      "Do you call that adoring me?" Densher demanded.

      They were talking, for the time, with the strangest mixture of deliberation and directness, and nothing could have been more in the tone of it than the way she at last said: "You're afraid of her yourself."

      He gave a smile a trifle glassy. "For young persons of a great distinction and a very high spirit, we're a caution!"

      "Yes," she took it straight up; "we're hideously intelligent. But there's fun in it too. We must get our fun where we can. I think," she added, and for that matter, not without courage, "our relation's beautiful. It's not a bit vulgar. I cling to some saving romance in things."

      It made him break into a laugh which had more freedom than his smile. "How you must be afraid you'll chuck me!"

      "No, no, that would be vulgar. But, of course, I do see my danger," she admitted, "of doing something base."

      "Then what can be so base as sacrificing me?"

      "I shan't sacrifice you; don't cry out till you're hurt. I shall sacrifice nobody and nothing, and that's just my situation, that I want and that I shall try for everything. That," she wound up, "is how I see myself, and how I see you quite as much, acting for them."

      "For 'them'?" and the young man strongly, extravagantly marked his coldness. "Thank you!"

      "Don't you care for them?"

      "Why should I? What are they to me but a serious nuisance?"