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+Project Gutenberg's The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2, by Henry James
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Release Date: July 19, 2009 [EBook #29452]
+[Last updated: October 12, 2022]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WINGS OF THE DOVE, VOL 1 OF 2 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by James Adcock. Special thanks to The Internet
+Archive: American Libraries, and Project Gutenberg Australia
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
+
+BY HENRY JAMES
+
+
+VOLUME I
+
+
+NEW YORK
+
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+1902
+
+
+Copyright, 1902, by
+
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+----
+
+Published, August, 1902
+
+
+
+TROW DIRECTORY
+
+PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
+
+NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FIRST
+
+
+
+
+THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+
+She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her
+unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in
+the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation
+that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him.
+It was at this point, however, that she remained; changing her place,
+moving from the shabby sofa to the armchair upholstered in a glazed
+cloth that gave at once--she had tried it--the sense of the slippery
+and of the sticky. She had looked at the sallow prints on the walls and
+at the lonely magazine, a year old, that combined, with a small lamp in
+coloured glass and a knitted white centre-piece wanting in freshness,
+to enhance the effect of the purplish cloth on the principal table; she
+had above all, from time to time, taken a brief stand on the small
+balcony to which the pair of long windows gave access. The vulgar
+little street, in this view, offered scant relief from the vulgar
+little room; its main office was to suggest to her that the narrow
+black house-fronts, adjusted to a standard that would have been low
+even for backs, constituted quite the publicity implied by such
+privacies. One felt them in the room exactly as one felt the room--the
+hundred like it or worse--in the street. Each time she turned in again,
+each time, in her impatience, she gave him up, it was to sound to a
+deeper depth, while she tasted the faint, flat emanation of things, the
+failure of fortune and of honour. If she continued to wait it was
+really, in a manner, that she might not add the shame of fear, of
+individual, personal collapse, to all the other shames. To feel the
+street, to feel the room, to feel the table-cloth and the centre-piece
+and the lamp, gave her a small, salutary sense, at least, of neither
+shirking nor lying. 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?
+
+Her father's life, her sister's, her own, that of her two lost
+brothers--the whole history of their house had the effect of some fine
+florid, voluminous phrase, say even a musical, that dropped first into
+words, into notes, without sense, and then, hanging unfinished, into no
+words, no notes at all. Why should a set of people have been put in
+motion, on such a scale and with such an air of being equipped for a
+profitable journey, only to break down without an accident, to stretch
+themselves in the wayside dust without a reason? The answer to these
+questions was not in Chirk Street, but the questions themselves
+bristled there, and the girl's repeated pause before the mirror and the
+chimney-place might have represented her nearest approach to an escape
+from them. Was it not in fact the partial escape from this "worst" in
+which she was steeped to be able to make herself out again as agreeable
+to see? She stared into the tarnished glass too hard indeed to be
+staring at her beauty alone. She readjusted the poise of her black,
+closely-feathered hat; retouched, beneath it, the thick fall of her
+dusky hair; kept her eyes, aslant, no less on her beautiful averted
+than on her beautiful presented oval. She was dressed altogether in
+black, which gave an even tone, by contrast, to her clear face and made
+her hair more harmoniously dark. Outside, on the balcony, her eyes
+showed as blue; within, at the mirror, they showed almost as black. She
+was handsome, but the degree of it was not sustained by items and aids;
+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.
+More "dressed," often, with fewer accessories, than other women, or
+less dressed, should occasion require, with more, she probably could
+not have given the key to these felicities. They were mysteries of
+which her friends were conscious--those friends whose general
+explanation was to say that she was clever, whether or no it were taken
+by the world as the cause or as the effect of her charm. If she saw
+more things than her fine face in the dull glass of her father's
+lodgings, she might have seen that, after all, she was not herself a
+fact in the collapse. She didn't judge herself cheap, she didn't make
+for misery. Personally, at least, she was not chalk-marked for the
+auction. She hadn't given up yet, and the broken sentence, if she was
+the last word, would end with a sort of meaning. There was a minute
+during which, though her eyes were fixed, she quite visibly lost
+herself in the thought of the way she might still pull things round had
+she only been a man. It was the name, above all, she would take in
+hand--the precious name she so liked and that, in spite of the harm her
+wretched father had done it, was not yet past praying for. She loved it
+in fact the more tenderly for that bleeding wound. But what could a
+penniless girl do with it but let it go?
+
+When her father at last appeared she became, as usual, instantly aware
+of the futility of any effort to hold him to anything. He had written
+her that he was ill, too ill to leave his room, and that he must see
+her without delay; and if this had been, as was probable, the sketch of
+a design, he was indifferent even to the moderate finish required for
+deception. He had clearly wanted, for perversities that he called
+reasons, to see her, just as she herself had sharpened for a talk; but
+she now again felt, in the inevitability of the freedom he used with
+her, all the old ache, her poor mother's very own, that he couldn't
+touch you ever so lightly without setting up. No relation with him
+could be so short or so superficial as not to be somehow to your hurt;
+and this, in the strangest way in the world, not because he desired it
+to be--feeling often, as he surely must, the profit for him of its not
+being--but because there was never a mistake for you that he could
+leave unmade or a conviction of his impossibility in you that he could
+approach you without strengthening. He might have awaited her on the
+sofa in his sitting-room, or might have stayed in bed and received her
+in that situation. She was glad to be spared the sight of such
+_penetralia,_ but it would have reminded her a little less that there
+was no truth in him. 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. Just so he even might die, but Kate fairly
+wondered on what evidence of his own she would some day have to believe
+it.
+
+He had not at present come down from his room, which she knew to be
+above the one they were in: he had already been out of the house,
+though he would either, should she challenge him, deny it or present it
+as a proof of his extremity. She had, however, by this time, quite
+ceased to challenge him; not only, face to face with him, vain
+irritation dropped, but he breathed upon the tragic consciousness in
+such a way that after a moment nothing of it was left. The difficulty
+was not less that he breathed in the same way upon the comic: she
+almost believed that with this latter she might still have found a
+foothold for clinging to him. He had ceased to be amusing--he was
+really too inhuman. His perfect look, which had floated him so long,
+was practically perfect still; but one had long since for every
+occasion taken it for granted. Nothing could have better shown than the
+actual how right one had been. He looked exactly as much as usual--all
+pink and silver as to skin and hair, all straitness and starch as to
+figure and dress--the man in the world least connected with anything
+unpleasant. He was so particularly the English gentleman and the
+fortunate, settled, normal person. Seen at a foreign _table d'hôte,_
+he suggested but one thing: "In what perfection England produces them!"
+He had kind, safe eyes, and a voice which, for all its clean fulness,
+told, in a manner, the happy history of its having never had once to
+raise itself. Life had met him so, half-way, 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. For a minute after he came in it was as if the place
+were her own and he the visitor with susceptibilities. He gave you
+funny feelings, he had indescribable arts, that quite turned the
+tables: that had been always how he came to see her mother so long as
+her mother would see him. He came from places they had often not known
+about, but he patronised Lexham Gardens. Kate's only actual expression
+of impatience, however, was "I'm glad you're so much better!"
+
+"I'm not so much better, my dear--I'm exceedingly unwell; the proof of
+which is, precisely, that I've been out to the chemist's--that beastly
+fellow at the corner." So Mr. Croy showed he could qualify the humble
+hand that assuaged him. "I'm taking something he has made up for me.
+It's just why I've sent for you--that you may see me as I really am."
+
+"Oh papa, it's long since I've ceased to see you otherwise than as you
+really are! I think we've all arrived by this time at the right word
+for that: 'You're beautiful--_n'en parlons plus.'_ You're as beautiful
+as ever--you look lovely." He judged meanwhile her own appearance, as
+she knew she could always trust him to do; recognising, estimating,
+sometimes disapproving, what she wore, showing her the interest he
+continued to take in her. He might really take none at all, yet she
+virtually knew herself the creature in the world to whom he was least
+indifferent. She had often enough wondered what on earth, at the pass
+he had reached, could give him pleasure, and she had come back, on
+these occasions, to that. It gave him pleasure that she was handsome,
+that she was, in her way, a sensible value. It was at least as marked,
+nevertheless, that he derived none from similar conditions, so far as
+they _were_ similar, in his other child. Poor Marian might be handsome,
+but he certainly didn't care. The hitch here, of course, was that, with
+whatever beauty, her sister, widowed and almost in want, with four
+bouncing children, was not a sensible value. She asked him, the next
+thing, how long he had been in his actual quarters, though aware of how
+little it mattered, how little any answer he might make would probably
+have in common with the truth. She failed in fact to notice his answer,
+truthful or not, already occupied as she was with what she had on her
+own side to say to him. This was really what had made her wait--what
+superseded the small remainder of her resentment at his constant
+practical impertinence; the result of all of which was that, within a
+minute, she had brought it out. "Yes--even now I'm willing to go with
+you. I don't know what you may have wished to say to me, and even if
+you hadn't written you would within a day or two have heard from me.
+Things have happened, and I've only waited, for seeing you, till I
+should be quite sure. I _am_ quite sure. I'll go with you."
+
+It produced an effect. "Go with me where?"
+
+"Anywhere. I'll stay with you. Even here." She had taken off her gloves
+and, as if she had arrived with her plan, she sat down.
+
+Lionel Croy hung about in his disengaged way--hovered there as if, in
+consequence of her words, looking for a pretext to back out easily: on
+which she immediately saw she had discounted, as it might be called,
+what he had himself been preparing. He wished her not to come to him,
+still less to settle with him, and had sent for her to give her up with
+some style and state; a part of the beauty of which, however, was to
+have been his sacrifice to her own detachment. There was no style, no
+state, unless she wished to forsake him. His idea had accordingly been
+to surrender her to her wish with all nobleness; it had by no means
+been to have positively to keep her off. She cared, however, not a
+straw for his embarrassment--feeling how little, on her own part, she
+was moved by charity. She had seen him, first and last, in so many
+attitudes that she could now deprive him quite without compunction of
+the luxury of a new one. Yet she felt the disconcerted gasp in his tone
+as he said: "Oh my child, I can never consent to that!"
+
+"What then are you going to do?"
+
+"I'm turning it over," said Lionel Croy. "You may imagine if I'm not
+thinking."
+
+"Haven't you thought then," his daughter asked, "of what I speak of? I
+mean of my being ready."
+
+Standing before her with his hands behind him and his legs a little
+apart, he swayed slightly to and fro, inclined toward her as if rising
+on his toes. It had an effect of conscientious deliberation. "No. I
+haven't. I couldn't. I wouldn't." It was so respectable, a show that
+she felt afresh, and with the memory of their old despair, the despair
+at home, how little his appearance ever by any chance told about him.
+His plausibility had been the heaviest of her mother's crosses;
+inevitably so much more present to the world than whatever it was that
+was horrid--thank God they didn't really know!--that he had done. He
+had positively been, in his way, by the force of his particular type, a
+terrible husband not to live with; his type reflecting so invidiously
+on the woman who had found him distasteful. Had this thereby not kept
+directly present to Kate herself that it might, on some sides, prove no
+light thing for her to leave uncompanioned a parent with such a face
+and such a manner? Yet if there was much she neither knew nor dreamed
+of, it passed between them at this very moment that he was quite
+familiar with himself as the subject of such quandaries. If he
+recognised his younger daughter's happy aspect as a sensible value, he
+had from the first still more exactly appraised his own. The great
+wonder was not that in spite of everything his own had helped him; the
+great wonder was that it hadn't helped him more. However, it was, to
+its old, eternal, recurrent tune, helping him all the while; her drop
+into patience with him showed how it was helping him at this moment.
+She saw the next instant precisely the line he would take. "Do you
+really ask me to believe you've been making up your mind to that?"
+
+She had to consider her own line. "I don't think I care, papa, what you
+believe. I never, for that matter, think of you as believing anything;
+hardly more," she permitted herself to add, "than I ever think of you
+as yourself believed. I don't know you, father, you see."
+
+"And it's your idea that you may make that up?"
+
+"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."
+
+"I don't get on," Mr. Croy almost gaily replied.
+
+His daughter took in the place again, and it might well have seemed odd
+that in so little to meet the eye there should be so much to show. What
+showed was the ugliness--so positive and palpable that it was somehow
+sustaining. It was a medium, a setting, and to that extent, after all,
+a dreadful sign of life; so that it fairly put a point into her answer.
+"Oh, I beg your pardon. You flourish."
+
+"Do you throw it up at me again," he pleasantly inquired, "that I've
+not made away with myself?"
+
+She treated the question as needing no reply; she sat there for real
+things. "You know how all our anxieties, under mamma's will, have come
+out. She had still less to leave than she feared. We don't know how we
+lived. It all makes up about two hundred a year for Marian, and two for
+me, but I give up a hundred to Marian."
+
+"Oh, you weak thing!" her father kindly sighed.
+
+"For you and me together," she went on, "the other hundred would do
+something."
+
+"And what would do the rest?"
+
+"Can you yourself do nothing?" He gave her a look; then, slipping his
+hands into his pockets and turning away, stood for a little at the
+window she had left open. She said nothing more--she had placed him
+there with that question, and the silence lasted a minute, broken by
+the call of an appealing costermonger, which came in with the mild
+March air, with the shabby sunshine, fearfully unbecoming to the room,
+and with the small homely hum of Chirk Street. Presently he moved
+nearer, but as if her question had quite dropped. "I don't see what has
+so suddenly wound you up."
+
+"I should have thought you might perhaps guess. Let me at any rate tell
+you. Aunt Maud has made me a proposal. But she has also made me a
+condition. She wants to keep me."
+
+"And what in the world else _could_ she possibly want?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know--many things. I'm not so precious a capture," the
+girl a little dryly explained. "No one has ever wanted to keep me
+before."
+
+Looking always what was proper, her father looked now still more
+surprised than interested. "You've not had proposals?" He spoke as if
+that were incredible of Lionel Croy's daughter; as if indeed such an
+admission scarce consorted, even in filial intimacy, with her high
+spirit and general form.
+
+"Not from rich relations. She's extremely kind to me, but it's time,
+she says, that we should understand each other."
+
+Mr. Croy fully assented. "Of course it is--high time; and I can quite
+imagine what she means by it."
+
+"Are you very sure?"
+
+"Oh, perfectly. She means that she'll 'do' for you handsomely if you'll
+break off all relations with me. You speak of her condition. Her
+condition's of course that."
+
+"Well then," said Kate, "it's what has wound me up. Here I am."
+
+He showed with a gesture how thoroughly he had taken it in; after
+which, within a few seconds, he had, quite congruously, turned the
+situation about. "Do you really suppose me in a position to justify
+your throwing yourself upon me?"
+
+She waited a little, but when she spoke it was clear. "Yes."
+
+"Well then, you're a bigger fool than I should have ventured to suppose
+you."
+
+"Why so? You live. You flourish. You bloom."
+
+"Ah, how you've all always hated me!" he murmured with a pensive gaze
+again at the window.
+
+"No one could be less of a mere cherished memory," she declared as if
+she had not heard him. "You're an actual person, if there ever was one.
+We agreed just now that you're beautiful. You strike me, you know,
+as--in your own way--much more firm on your feet than I am. Don't put
+it to me therefore as monstrous that the fact that we are, after all,
+parent and child should at present in some manner count for us. My idea
+has been that it should have some effect for each of us. I don't at
+all, as I told you just now," she pursued, "make out your life; but
+whatever it is I hereby offer you to accept it. And, on my side, I'll
+do everything I can for you."
+
+"I see," said Lionel Croy. Then, with the sound of extreme relevance,
+"And what _can_ you?" She only, at this, hesitated, and he took up her
+silence. "You can describe yourself--_to_ yourself--as, in a fine
+flight, giving up your aunt for me; but what good, I should like to
+know, would your fine flight do me?" As she still said nothing he
+developed a little. "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." She rose now, as if in sight of the term of her
+effort, in sight of the futility and the weariness of many things, and
+moved back to the poor little glass with which she had communed before.
+She retouched here again the poise of her hat, and this brought to her
+father's lips another remark in which impatience, however, had already
+been replaced by a funny flare of appreciation. "Oh, you're all right!
+Don't muddle yourself up with _me!"_
+
+His daughter turned round to him. "The condition Aunt Maud makes is
+that I shall have absolutely nothing to do with you; never see you, nor
+speak, nor write to you, never go near you nor make you a sign, nor
+hold any sort of communication with you. What she requires is that you
+shall simply cease to exist for me."
+
+He had always seemed--it was one of the marks of what they called the
+"unspeakable" in him--to walk a little more on his toes, as if for
+jauntiness, in the presence of offence. Nothing, however, was more
+wonderful than what he sometimes would take for offence, unless it
+might be what he sometimes wouldn't. He walked at any rate on his toes
+now. "A very proper requirement of your Aunt Maud, my dear--I don't
+hesitate to say it!" Yet as this, much as she had seen, left her silent
+at first from what might have been a sense of sickness, he had time to
+go on: "That's her condition then. But what are her promises? Just what
+does she engage to do? You must work it, you know."
+
+"You mean make her feel," Kate asked after a moment, "how much I'm
+attached to you?"
+
+"Well, what a cruel, invidious treaty it is for you to sign. I'm a poor
+old dad to make a stand about giving up--I quite agree. But I'm not,
+after all, quite the old dad not to get something _for_ giving up."
+
+"Oh, I think her idea," said Kate almost gaily now, "is that I shall
+get a great deal."
+
+He met her with his inimitable amenity. "But does she give you the
+items?"
+
+The girl went through the show. "More or less, I think. But many of
+them are things I dare say I may take for granted--things women can do
+for each other and that you wouldn't understand."
+
+"There's nothing I understand so well, always, as the things I needn't!
+But what I want to do, you see," he went on, "is to put it to your
+conscience that you've an admirable opportunity; and that it's moreover
+one for which, after all, damn you, you've really to thank _me."_
+
+"I confess I don't see," Kate observed, "what my 'conscience' has to do
+with it."
+
+"Then, my dear girl, you ought simply to be ashamed of yourself. Do you
+know what you're a proof of, all you hard, hollow people together?" He
+put the question with a charming air of sudden spiritual heat. "Of the
+deplorably superficial morality of the age. The family sentiment, in
+our vulgarised, brutalised life, has gone utterly to pot. There was a
+day when a man like me--by which I mean a parent like me--would have
+been for a daughter like you a quite distinct value; what's called in
+the business world, I believe, an 'asset.'" He continued sociably to
+make it out. "I'm not talking only of what you might, with the right
+feeling do _for_ me, but of what you might--it's what I call your
+opportunity--do _with_ me. Unless indeed," he the next moment
+imperturbably threw off, "they come a good deal to the same thing. Your
+duty as well as your chance, if you're capable of seeing it, is to use
+me. Show family feeling by seeing what I'm good for. If you had it as
+_I_ have it you'd see I'm still good--well, for a lot of things.
+There's in fact, my dear," Mr. Croy wound up, "a coach-and-four to be
+got out of me." His drop, or rather his climax, failed a little of
+effect, indeed, through an undue precipitation of memory. Something his
+daughter had said came back to him. "You've settled to give away half
+your little inheritance?"
+
+Her hesitation broke into laughter. "No--I haven't 'settled' anything."
+
+"But you mean, practically, to let Marian collar it?" They stood there
+face to face, but she so denied herself to his challenge that he could
+only go on. "You've a view of three hundred a year for her in addition
+to what her husband left her with? Is _that,"_ the remote progenitor of
+such wantonness audibly wondered, "your morality?"
+
+Kate found her answer without trouble. "Is it your idea that I should
+give you everything?"
+
+The "everything" clearly struck him--to the point even of determining
+the tone of his reply. "Far from it. How can you ask that when I refuse
+what you tell me you came to offer? Make of my idea what you can; I
+think I've sufficiently expressed it, and it's at any rate to take or
+to leave. It's the only one, I may nevertheless add; it's the basket
+with all my eggs. It's my conception, in short, of your duty."
+
+The girl's tired smile watched the word as if it had taken on a small
+grotesque visibility. "You're wonderful on such subjects! I think I
+should leave you in no doubt," she pursued, "that if I were to sign my
+aunt's agreement I should carry it out, in honour, to the letter."
+
+"Rather, my own love! It's just your honour that I appeal to. The only
+way to play the game _is_ to play it. There's no limit to what your
+aunt can do for you."
+
+"Do you mean in the way of marrying me?"
+
+"What else should I mean? Marry properly----"
+
+"And then?" Kate asked as he hung fire.
+
+"And then--well, I _will_ talk with you. I'll resume relations."
+
+She looked about her and picked up her parasol. "Because you're not so
+afraid of any one else in the world as you are of _her?_ My husband, if
+I should marry, would be, at the worst, less of a terror? If that's
+what you mean, there may be something in it. But doesn't it depend a
+little also on what you mean by my getting a proper one? However," Kate
+added as she picked out the frill of her little umbrella, "I don't
+suppose your idea of him is _quite_ that he should persuade you to live
+with us."
+
+"Dear no--not a bit." He spoke as not resenting either the fear or the
+hope she imputed; met both imputations, in fact, with a sort of
+intellectual relief. "I place the case for you wholly in your aunt's
+hands. I take her view, with my eyes shut; I accept in all confidence
+any man she selects. If he's good enough for _her_--elephantine snob as
+she is--he's good enough for me; and quite in spite of the fact that
+she'll be sure to select one who can be trusted to be nasty to me. My
+only interest is in your doing what she wants. You shan't be so beastly
+poor, my darling," Mr. Croy declared, "if I can help it."
+
+"Well then, good-bye, papa," the girl said after a reflection on this
+that had perceptibly ended for her in a renunciation of further debate.
+"Of course you understand that it may be for long."
+
+Her companion, hereupon, had one of his finest inspirations. "Why not,
+frankly, for ever? You must do me the justice to see that I don't do
+things, that I've never done them, by halves--that if I offer you to
+efface myself, it's for the final, fatal sponge that I ask, well
+saturated and well applied."
+
+She turned her handsome, quiet face upon him at such length that it
+might well have been for the last time. "I don't know what you're like."
+
+"No more do I, my dear. I've spent my life in trying, in vain, to
+discover. Like nothing--more's the pity. If there had been many of us,
+and we could have found each other out, there's no knowing what we
+mightn't have done. But it doesn't matter now. Good-bye, love." He
+looked even not sure of what she would wish him to suppose on the
+subject of a kiss, yet also not embarrassed by his uncertainty.
+
+She forbore in fact for a moment longer to clear it up. "I wish there
+were some one here who might serve--for any contingency--as a witness
+that I _have_ put it to you that I'm ready to come."
+
+"Would you like me," her father asked, "to call the landlady?"
+
+"You may not believe me," she pursued, "but I came really hoping you
+might have found some way. I'm very sorry, at all events, to leave you
+unwell." He turned away from her, on this, and, as he had done before,
+took refuge, by the window, in a stare at the street. "Let me put
+it--unfortunately without a witness," she added after a moment, "that
+there's only one word you really need speak."
+
+When he took this up it was still with his back to her. "If I don't
+strike you as having already spoken it, our time has been singularly
+wasted."
+
+"I'll engage with you in respect to my aunt exactly to what she wants
+of me in respect to you. She wants me to choose. Very well, I _will_
+choose. I'll wash my hands of her for you to just that tune."
+
+He at last brought himself round. "Do you know, dear, you make me sick?
+I've tried to be clear, and it isn't fair."
+
+But she passed this over; she was too visibly sincere. "Father!"
+
+"I don't quite see what's the matter with you," he said, "and if you
+can't pull yourself together I'll--upon my honour--take you in hand.
+Put you into a cab and deliver you again safe at Lancaster Gate."
+
+She was really absent, distant. "Father."
+
+It was too much, and he met it sharply. "Well?"
+
+"Strange as it may be to you to hear me say it, there's a good you can
+do me and a help you can render."
+
+"Isn't it then exactly what I've been trying to make you feel?"
+
+"Yes," she answered patiently, "but so in the wrong way. I'm perfectly
+honest in what I say, and I know what I'm talking about. It isn't that
+I'll pretend I could have believed a month ago in anything to call aid
+or support from you. The case is changed--that's what has happened; my
+difficulty's a new one. But even now it's not a question of anything I
+should ask you in a way to 'do.' It's simply a question of your not
+turning me away--taking yourself out of my life. It's simply a question
+of your saying: 'Yes then, since you will, we'll stand together. We
+won't worry in advance about how or where; we'll have a faith and find
+a way.' That's all--_that_ would be the good you'd do me. I should
+_have_ you, and it would be for my benefit. Do you see?"
+
+If he didn't it was not for want of looking at her hard. "The matter
+with you is that you're in love, and that your aunt knows and--for
+reasons, I'm sure, perfect--hates and opposes it. Well she may! It's a
+matter in which I trust her with my eyes shut. Go, please." Though he
+spoke not in anger--rather in infinite sadness--he fairly turned her
+out. Before she took it up he had, as the fullest expression of what he
+felt, opened the door of the room. He had fairly, in his deep
+disapproval, a generous compassion to spare. "I'm sorry for her,
+deluded woman, if she builds on you."
+
+Kate stood a moment in the draught. "She's not the person _I_ pity
+most, for, deluded in many ways though she may be, she's not the person
+who's most so. I mean," she explained, "if it's a question of what you
+call building on me."
+
+He took it as if what she meant might be other than her description of
+it. "You're deceiving _two_ persons then, Mrs. Lowder and somebody
+else?"
+
+She shook her head with detachment. "I've no intention of that sort
+with respect to any one now--to Mrs. Lowder least of all. If you fail
+me"--she seemed to make it out for herself--"that has the merit at
+least that it simplifies. I shall go my way--as I see my way."
+
+"Your way, you mean then, will be to marry some blackguard without a
+penny?"
+
+"You ask a great deal of satisfaction," she observed, "for the little
+you give."
+
+It brought him up again before her as with a sense that she was not to
+be hustled; and, though he glared at her a little, this had long been
+the practical limit to his general power of objection. "If you're base
+enough to incur your aunt's disgust, you're base enough for my
+argument. What, if you're not thinking of an utterly improper person,
+do your speeches to me signify? Who _is_ the beggarly sneak?" he
+demanded as her response failed. Her response, when it came, was cold
+but distinct. "He has every disposition to make the best of you. He
+only wants in fact to be kind to you."
+
+"Then he _must_ be an ass! And how in the world can you consider it to
+improve him for me," her father pursued, "that he's also destitute and
+impossible? There are asses and asses, even--the right and the
+wrong--and you appear to have carefully picked out one of the wrong.
+Your aunt knows _them,_ by good fortune; I perfectly trust, as I tell
+you, her judgment for them; and you may take it from me once for all
+that I won't hear of any one of whom _she_ won't." Which led up to his
+last word. "If you should really defy us both----!"
+
+"Well, papa?"
+
+"Well, my sweet child, I think that--reduced to insignificance as you
+may fondly believe me--I should still not be quite without some way of
+making you regret it."
+
+She had a pause, a grave one, but not, as appeared, that she might
+measure this danger. "If I shouldn't do it, you know, it wouldn't be
+because I'm afraid of you."
+
+"Oh, if you don't do it," he retorted, "you may be as bold as you like!"
+
+"Then you can do nothing at all for me?"
+
+He showed her, this time unmistakably--it was before her there on the
+landing, at the top of the tortuous stairs and in the midst of the
+strange smell that seemed to cling to them--how vain her appeal
+remained. "I've never pretended to do more than my duty; I've given you
+the best and the clearest advice." And then came up the spring that
+moved him. "If it only displeases you, you can go to Marian to be
+consoled." What he couldn't forgive was her dividing with Marian her
+scant share of the provision their mother had been able to leave them.
+She should have divided it with _him._
+
+
+II
+
+She had gone to Mrs. Lowder on her mother's death--gone with an effort
+the strain and pain of which made her at present, as she recalled them,
+reflect on the long way she had travelled since then. There had been
+nothing else to do--not a penny in the other house, nothing but unpaid
+bills that had gathered thick while its mistress lay mortally ill, and
+the admonition that there was nothing she must attempt to raise money
+on, since everything belonged to the "estate." How the estate would
+turn out at best presented itself as a mystery altogether gruesome; it
+had proved, in fact, since then a residuum a trifle less scant than,
+with Marian, she had for some weeks feared; but the girl had had at the
+beginning rather a wounded sense of its being watched on behalf of
+Marian and her children. What on earth was it supposed that _she_
+wanted to do to it? She wanted in truth only to give up--to abandon her
+own interest, which she, no doubt, would already have done had not the
+point been subject to Aunt Maud's sharp intervention. Aunt Maud's
+intervention was all sharp now, and the other point, the great one, was
+that it was to be, in this light, either all put up with or all
+declined. Yet at the winter's end, nevertheless, she could scarce have
+said what stand she conceived she had taken. It wouldn't be the first
+time she had seen herself obliged to accept with smothered irony other
+people's interpretation of her conduct. She often ended by giving up to
+them--it seemed really the way to live--the version that met their
+convenience.
+
+The tall, rich, heavy house at Lancaster Gate, on the other side of the
+Park and the long South Kensington stretches, had figured to her,
+through childhood, through girlhood, as the remotest limit of her vague
+young world. It was further off and more occasional than anything else
+in the comparatively compact circle in which she revolved, and seemed,
+by a rigour early marked, to be reached through long, straight,
+discouraging vistas, which kept lengthening and straightening, whereas
+almost everything else in life was either, at the worst, round about
+Cromwell Road, or, at the furthest, in the nearer parts of Kensington
+Gardens. Mrs. Lowder was her only "real" aunt, not the wife of an
+uncle, and had been thereby, both in ancient days and when the greater
+trouble came, the person, of all persons, properly to make some sign;
+in accord with which our young woman's feeling was founded on the
+impression, quite cherished for years, that the signs made across the
+interval just mentioned had never been really in the note of the
+situation. The main office of this relative, for the young Croys--apart
+from giving them their fixed measure of social greatness--had struck
+them as being to form them to a conception of what they were not to
+expect. When Kate came to think matters over with the aid of knowledge,
+she failed quite to see how Aunt Maud could have been different--she
+had rather perceived by this time how many other things might have
+been; yet she also made out that if they had all consciously lived
+under a liability to the chill breath of _ultima Thule_ they couldn't,
+either, on the facts, very well have done less. What in the event
+appeared established was that if Mrs. Lowder had disliked them she had
+yet not disliked them so much as they supposed. It had at any rate been
+for the purpose of showing how she struggled with her aversion that she
+sometimes came to see them, that she at regular periods invited them to
+her house, and in short, as it now looked, kept them along on the terms
+that would best give her sister the perennial luxury of a grievance.
+This sister, poor Mrs. Croy, the girl knew, had always judged her
+resentfully, and had brought them up, Marian, the boys and herself, to
+the idea of a particular attitude, for signs of the practice of which
+they watched each other with awe. The attitude was to make plain to
+Aunt Maud, with the same regularity as her invitations, that they
+sufficed--thanks awfully--to themselves. But the ground of it, Kate
+lived to discern, was that this was only because _she_ didn't suffice
+to them. The little she offered was to be accepted under protest, yet
+not, really, because it was excessive. It wounded them--there was the
+rub!--because it fell short.
+
+The number of new things our young lady looked out on from the high
+south window that hung over the Park--this number was so great (though
+some of the things were only old ones altered and, as the phrase was of
+other matters, done up), that life at present turned to her view from
+week to week more and more the face of a striking and distinguished
+stranger. She had reached a great age--for it quite seemed to her that
+at twenty-five it was late to reconsider; and her most general sense
+was a shade of regret that she had not known earlier. The world was
+different--whether for worse or for better--from her rudimentary
+readings, and it gave her the feeling of a wasted past. If she had only
+known sooner she might have arranged herself more to meet it. She made,
+at all events, discoveries every day, some of which were about herself
+and others about other persons. Two of these--one under each head--more
+particularly engaged, in alternation, her anxiety. She saw as she had
+never seen before how material things spoke to her. She saw, and she
+blushed to see, that if, in contrast with some of its old aspects, life
+now affected her as a dress successfully "done up," this was exactly by
+reason of the trimmings and lace, was a matter of ribbons and silk and
+velvet. She had a dire accessibility to pleasure from such sources. She
+liked the charming quarters her aunt had assigned her--liked them
+literally more than she had in all her other days liked anything; and
+nothing could have been more uneasy than her suspicion of her
+relative's view of this truth. Her relative was prodigious--she had
+never done her relative justice. These larger conditions all tasted of
+her, from morning till night; but she was a person in respect to whom
+the growth of acquaintance could only--strange as it might seem--keep
+your heart in your mouth.
+
+The girl's second great discovery was that, so far from having been for
+Mrs. Lowder a subject of superficial consideration, the blighted home
+in Lexham Gardens had haunted her nights and her days. Kate had spent,
+all winter, hours of observation that were not less pointed for being
+spent alone; recent events, which her mourning explained, assured her a
+measure of isolation, and it was in the isolation above all that her
+neighbour's influence worked. Sitting far downstairs Aunt Maud was yet
+a presence from which a sensitive niece could feel herself extremely
+under pressure. She knew herself now, the sensitive niece, as having
+been marked from far back. She knew more than she could have told you,
+by the upstairs fire, in a whole dark December afternoon. She knew so
+much that her knowledge was what fairly kept her there, making her at
+times more endlessly between the small silk-covered sofa that stood for
+her in the firelight and the great grey map of Middlesex spread beneath
+her lookout. To go down, to forsake her refuge, was to meet some of her
+discoveries half-way, to have to face them or fly before them; whereas
+they were at such a height only like the rumble of a far-off siege
+heard in the provisioned citadel. She had almost liked, in these weeks,
+what had created her suspense and her stress: the loss of her mother,
+the submersion of her father, the discomfort of her sister, the
+confirmation of their shrunken prospects, the certainty, in especial,
+of her having to recognise that, should she behave, as she called it,
+decently--that is still do something for others--she would be herself
+wholly without supplies. She held that she had a right to sadness and
+stillness; she nursed them for their postponing power. What they mainly
+postponed was the question of a surrender--though she could not yet
+have said exactly of what: a general surrender of everything--that was
+at moments the way it presented itself--to Aunt Maud's looming
+"personality." It was by her personality that Aunt Maud was prodigious,
+and the great mass of it loomed because, in the thick, the foglike air
+of her arranged existence, there were parts doubtless magnified and
+parts certainly vague. They represented at all events alike, the dim
+and the distinct, a strong will and a high hand. It was perfectly
+present to Kate that she might be devoured, and she likened herself to
+a trembling kid, kept apart a day or two till her turn should come, but
+sure sooner or later to be introduced into the cage of the lioness.
+
+The cage was Aunt Maud's own room, her office, her counting-house, her
+battlefield, her especial scene, in fine, of action, situated on the
+ground-floor, opening from the main hall and figuring rather to our
+young woman on exit and entrance as a guard house or a toll-gate. The
+lioness waited--the kid had at least that consciousness; was aware of
+the neighbourhood of a morsel she had reason to suppose tender. She
+would have been meanwhile a wonderful lioness for a show, an
+extraordinary figure in a cage or anywhere; majestic, magnificent,
+high-coloured, all brilliant gloss, perpetual satin, twinkling bugles
+and flashing gems, with a lustre of agate eyes, a sheen of raven hair,
+a polish of complexion that was like that of well-kept china and
+that--as if the skin were too tight--told especially at curves and
+corners. Her niece had a quiet name for her--she kept it quiet;
+thinking of her, with a free fancy, as somehow typically insular, she
+talked to herself of Britannia of the Market Place--Britannia
+unmistakable, but with a pen in her ear, and felt she should not be
+happy till she might on some occasion add to the rest of the panoply a
+helmet, a shield, a trident and a ledger. It was not in truth, however,
+that the forces with which, as Kate felt, she would have to deal were
+those most suggested by an image simple and broad; she was learning,
+after all, each day, to know her companion, and what she had already
+most perceived was the mistake of trusting to easy analogies. There was
+a whole side of Britannia, the side of her florid philistinism, her
+plumes and her train, her fantastic furniture and heaving bosom, the
+false gods of her taste and false notes of her talk, the sole
+contemplation of which would be dangerously misleading. She was a
+complex and subtle Britannia, as passionate as she was practical, with
+a reticule for her prejudices as deep as that other pocket, the pocket
+full of coins stamped in her image, that the world best knew her by.
+She carried on, in short, behind her aggressive and defensive front,
+operations determined by her wisdom. It was in fact, we have hinted, as
+a besieger that our young lady, in the provisioned citadel, had for the
+present most to think of her, and what made her formidable in this
+character was that she was unscrupulous and immoral. So, at all events,
+in silent sessions and a youthful off-hand way, Kate conveniently
+pictured her: what this sufficiently represented being that her weight
+was in the scale of certain dangers--those dangers that, by our
+showing, made the younger woman linger and lurk above, while the elder,
+below, both militant and diplomatic, covered as much of the ground as
+possible. Yet what were the dangers, after all, but just the dangers of
+life and of London? Mrs. Lowder _was_ London, _was_ life--the roar of
+the siege and the thick of the fray. There were some things, after all,
+of which Britannia was afraid; but Aunt Maud was afraid of nothing--not
+even, it would appear, of arduous thought. These impressions, none the
+less, Kate kept so much to herself that she scarce shared them with
+poor Marian, the ostensible purpose of her frequent visits to whom yet
+continued to be to talk over everything. One of her reasons for holding
+off from the last concession to Aunt Maud was that she might be the
+more free to commit herself to this so much nearer and so much less
+fortunate relative, with whom Aunt Maud would have, directly, almost
+nothing to do. The sharpest pinch of her state, meanwhile, was exactly
+that all intercourse with her sister had the effect of casting down her
+courage and tying her hands, adding daily to her sense of the part, not
+always either uplifting or sweetening, that the bond of blood might
+play in one's life. She was face to face with it now, with the bond of
+blood; the consciousness of it was what she seemed most clearly to have
+"come into" by the death of her mother, much of that consciousness as
+her mother had absorbed and carried away. Her haunting, harrassing
+father, her menacing, uncompromising aunt, her portionless little
+nephews and nieces, were figures that caused the chord of natural piety
+superabundantly to vibrate. Her manner of putting it to herself--but
+more especially in respect to Marian--was that she saw what you might
+be brought to by the cultivation of consanguinity. She had taken, in
+the old days, as she supposed, the measure of this liability; those
+being the days when, as the second-born, she had thought no one in the
+world so pretty as Marian, no one so charming, so clever, so assured,
+in advance, of happiness and success. The view was different now, but
+her attitude had been obliged, for many reasons, to show as the same.
+The subject of this estimate was no longer pretty, as the reason for
+thinking her clever was no longer plain; yet, bereaved, disappointed,
+demoralised, querulous, she was all the more sharply and insistently
+Kate's elder and Kate's own. Kate's most constant feeling about her was
+that she would make her, Kate, do things; and always, in comfortless
+Chelsea, at the door of the small house the small rent of which she
+couldn't help having on her mind, she fatalistically asked herself,
+before going in, which thing it would probably be this time. She
+noticed with profundity that disappointment made people selfish; she
+marvelled at the serenity--it was the poor woman's only one--of what
+Marian took for granted: her own state of abasement as the second-born,
+her life reduced to mere inexhaustible sisterhood. She existed, in that
+view, wholly for the small house in Chelsea; 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. You
+always saw, in this case, something else than what you were, and you
+got, in consequence, none of the peace of your condition. However, as
+she never really let Marian see what she was, Marian might well not
+have been aware that she herself saw. Kate was accordingly, to her own
+vision, not a hypocrite of virtue, for she gave herself up; but she was
+a hypocrite of stupidity, for she kept to herself everything that was
+not herself. What she most kept was the particular sentiment with which
+she watched her sister instinctively neglect nothing that would make
+for her submission to their aunt; a state of the spirit that perhaps
+marked most sharply how poor you might become when you minded so much
+the absence of wealth. It was through Kate that Aunt Maud should be
+worked, and nothing mattered less than what might become of Kate in the
+process. Kate was to burn her ships, in short, so that Marian should
+profit; and Marian's desire to profit was quite oblivious of a dignity
+that had, after all, its reasons--if it had only cared for them--for
+keeping itself a little stiff. Kate, to be properly stiff for both of
+them, would therefore have had to be selfish, have had to prefer an
+ideal of behaviour--than which nothing, ever, was more selfish--to the
+possibility of stray crumbs for the four small creatures. The tale of
+Mrs. Lowder's disgust at her elder niece's marriage to Mr. Condrip had
+lost little of its point; the incredibly fatuous behaviour of Mr.
+Condrip, the parson of a dull suburban parish, with a saintly profile
+which was always in evidence, being so distinctly on record to keep
+criticism consistent. He had presented his profile on system, having,
+goodness knew, nothing else to present--nothing at all to full-face the
+world with, no imagination of the propriety of living and minding his
+business. Criticism had remained on Aunt Maud's part consistent enough;
+she was not a person to regard such proceedings as less of a mistake
+for having acquired more of the privilege of pathos. She had not been
+forgiving, and the only approach she made to overlooking them was by
+overlooking--with the surviving delinquent--the solid little phalanx
+that now represented them. Of the two sinister ceremonies that she
+lumped together, the marriage and the interment, she had been present
+at the former, just as she had sent Marian, before it, a liberal
+cheque; but this had not been for her more than the shadow of an
+admitted link with Mrs. Condrip's course. She disapproved of clamorous
+children for whom there was no prospect; she disapproved of weeping
+widows who couldn't make their errors good; and she had thus put within
+Marian's reach one of the few luxuries left when so much else had gone,
+an easy pretext for a constant grievance. Kate Croy remembered well
+what their mother, in a different quarter, had made of it; and it was
+Marian's marked failure to pluck the fruit of resentment that committed
+them, as sisters, to an almost equal fellowship in abjection. If the
+theory was that, yes, alas, one of the pair had ceased to be noticed,
+but that the other was noticed enough to make up for it, who would fail
+to see that Kate couldn't separate herself without a cruel pride? That
+lesson became sharp for our young lady the day after her interview with
+her father.
+
+"I can't imagine," Marian on this occasion said to her, "how you can
+think of anything else in the world but the horrid way we're situated."
+
+"And, pray, how do you know," Kate inquired in reply, "anything about
+my thoughts? It seems to me I give you sufficient proof of how much I
+think of _you._ I don't, really, my dear, know what else you've to do
+with!"
+
+Marian's retort, on this, was a stroke as to which she had supplied
+herself with several kinds of preparation, but there was, none the
+less, something of an unexpected note in its promptitude. She had
+foreseen her sister's general fear; but here, ominously, was the
+special one. "Well, your own business is of course your own business,
+and you may say there's no one less in a position than I to preach to
+you. But, all the same, if you wash your hands of me for ever for it, I
+won't, for this once, keep back that I don't consider you've a right,
+as we all stand, to throw yourself away."
+
+It was after the children's dinner, which was also their mother's, but
+which their aunt mostly contrived to keep from ever becoming her own
+luncheon; and the two young women were still in the presence of the
+crumpled table-cloth, the dispersed pinafores, the scraped dishes, the
+lingering odour of boiled food. Kate had asked, with ceremony, if she
+might put up a window a little, and Mrs. Condrip had replied without it
+that she might do as she liked. She often received such inquiries as if
+they reflected in a manner on the pure essence of her little ones. The
+four had retired, with much movement and noise, under imperfect control
+of the small Irish governess whom their aunt had hunted out for them
+and whose brooding resolve not to prolong so uncrowned a martyrdom she
+already more than suspected. Their mother had become for Kate--who took
+it just for the effect of being their mother--quite a different thing
+from the mild Marian of the past: Mr. Condrip's widow expansively
+obscured that image. She was little more than a ragged relic, a plain,
+prosaic result of him, as if she had somehow been pulled through him as
+through an obstinate funnel, only to be left crumpled and useless and
+with nothing in her but what he accounted for. She had grown red and
+almost fat, which were not happy signs of mourning; less and less like
+any Croy, particularly a Croy in trouble, and sensibly like her
+husband's two unmarried sisters, who came to see her, in Kate's view,
+much too often and stayed too long, with the consequence of inroads
+upon the tea and bread-and-butter--matters as to which Kate, not
+unconcerned with the tradesmen's books, had feelings. About them,
+moreover, Marian _was_ touchy, and her nearer relative, who observed
+and weighed things, noted as an oddity that she would have taken any
+reflection on them as a reflection on herself. If that was what
+marriage necessarily did to you, Kate Croy would have questioned
+marriage. It was a grave example, at any rate, of what a man--and such
+a man!--might make of a woman. She could see how the Condrip pair
+pressed their brother's widow on the subject of Aunt Maud--who wasn't,
+after all, _their_ aunt; made her, over their interminable cups,
+chatter and even swagger about Lancaster Gate, made her more vulgar
+than it had seemed written that any Croy could possibly become on such
+a subject. They laid it down, they rubbed it in, that Lancaster Gate
+was to be kept in sight, and that she, Kate, was to keep it; so that,
+curiously, or at all events sadly, our young woman was sure of being,
+in her own person, more permitted to them as an object of comment than
+they would in turn ever be permitted to herself. 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. "I
+don't quite see," she answered, "where, in particular, it strikes you
+that my danger lies. I'm not conscious, I assure you, of the least
+'disposition' to throw myself anywhere. I feel as if, for the present,
+I have been quite sufficiently thrown."
+
+"You don't feel"--Marian brought it all out--"as if you would like to
+marry Merton Densher?"
+
+Kate took a moment to meet this inquiry. "Is it your idea that if I
+should feel so I would be bound to give you notice, so that you might
+step in and head me off? Is that your idea?" the girl asked. Then, as
+her sister also had a pause, "I don't know what makes you talk of Mr.
+Densher," she observed.
+
+"I talk of him just because you don't. That you never do, in spite of
+what I know--that's what makes me think of him. Or rather perhaps it's
+what makes me think of _you._ If you don't know by this time what I
+hope for you, what I dream of--my attachment being what it is--it's no
+use my attempting to tell you." But Marian had in fact warmed to her
+work, and Kate was sure she had discussed Mr. Densher with the Miss
+Condrips. "If I name that person I suppose it's because I'm so afraid
+of him. If you want really to know, he fills me with terror. If you
+want really to know, in fact, I dislike him as much as I dread him."
+
+"And yet don't think it dangerous to abuse him to me?"
+
+"Yes," Mrs. Condrip confessed, "I do think it dangerous; but how can I
+speak of him otherwise? I dare say, I admit, that I shouldn't speak of
+him at all. Only I do want you for once, as I said just now, to know."
+
+"To know what, my dear?"
+
+"That I should regard it," Marian promptly returned, "as far and away
+the worst thing that has happened to us yet."
+
+"Do you mean because he hasn't money?"
+
+"Yes, for one thing. And because I don't believe in him."
+
+Kate was civil, but perfunctory. "What do you mean by not believing in
+him?"
+
+"Well, being sure he'll never get it. And you _must_ have it. You
+_shall_ have it."
+
+"To give it to you?"
+
+Marian met her with a readiness that was practically pert. "To _have_
+it, first. Not, at any rate, to go on not having it. Then we should
+see."
+
+"We should indeed!" said Kate Croy. It was talk of a kind she loathed,
+but if Marian chose to be vulgar what was one to do? It made her think
+of the Miss Condrips with renewed aversion. "I like the way you arrange
+things--I like what you take for granted. If it's so easy for us to
+marry men who want us to scatter gold, I wonder we any of us do
+anything else. I don't see so many of them about, nor what interest I
+might ever have for them. You live, my dear," she presently added, "in
+a world of vain thoughts."
+
+"Not so much as you, Kate; for I see what I see, and you can't turn it
+off that way." The elder sister paused long enough for the younger's
+face to show, in spite of superiority, an apprehension. "I'm not
+talking of any man but Aunt Maud's man, nor of any money, even, if you
+like, but Aunt Maud's money. I'm not talking of anything but your doing
+what _she_ wants. You're wrong if you speak of anything that I want of
+you; I want nothing but what she does. That's good enough for me!"--and
+Marian's tone struck her companion as dreadful. "If I don't believe in
+Merton Densher, I do at least in Mrs. Lowder."
+
+"Your ideas are the more striking," Kate returned, "that they're the
+same as papa's. I had them from him, you may be interested to know--and
+with all the brilliancy you may imagine--yesterday."
+
+Marian clearly was interested to know. "He has been to see you?"
+
+"No, I went to him."
+
+"Really?" Marian wondered. "For what purpose?"
+
+"To tell him I'm ready to go to him."
+
+Marian stared. "To leave Aunt Maud----?"
+
+"For my father, yes."
+
+She had fairly flushed, poor Mrs. Condrip, with horror. "You're
+ready----?"
+
+"So I told him. I couldn't tell him less."
+
+"And, pray, could you tell him more?" Marian gasped in her distress.
+"What in the world is he _to_ us? You bring out such a thing as that
+this way?"
+
+They faced each other--the tears were in Marian's eyes. Kate watched
+them there a moment and then said: "I had thought it well over--over
+and over. But you needn't feel injured. I'm not going. He won't have
+me."
+
+Her companion still panted--it took time to subside. "Well, _I_
+wouldn't have you--wouldn't receive you at all, I can assure you--if he
+had made you any other answer. I do feel injured--at your having been
+willing. If you were to go to papa, my dear, you would have to stop
+coming to me." Marian put it thus, indefinably, as a picture of
+privation from which her companion might shrink. Such were the threats
+she could complacently make, could think herself masterful for making.
+"But if he won't take you," she continued, "he shows at least his
+sharpness."
+
+Marian had always her views of sharpness; she was, as her sister
+privately commented, great on it. But Kate had her refuge from
+irritation. "He won't take me," she simply repeated. "But he believes,
+like you, in Aunt Maud. He threatens me with his curse if I leave her."
+
+"So you _won't?"_ As the girl at first said nothing her companion
+caught at it. "You won't, of course? I see you won't. But I don't see
+why, nevertheless, I shouldn't insist to you once for all on the plain
+truth of the whole matter. The truth, my dear, of your duty. Do you
+ever think about _that?_ It's the greatest duty of all."
+
+"There you are again," Kate laughed. "Papa's also immense on my duty."
+
+"Oh, I don't pretend to be immense, but I pretend to know more than you
+do of life; more even perhaps than papa." Marian seemed to see that
+personage at this moment, nevertheless, in the light of a kinder irony.
+"Poor old papa!"
+
+She sighed it with as many condonations as her sister's ear had more
+than once caught in her "Dear old Aunt Maud!" These were things that
+made Kate, for the time, turn sharply away, and she gathered herself
+now to go. They were the note again of the abject; it was hard to say
+which of the persons in question had most shown how little they liked
+her. The younger woman proposed, at any rate, to let discussion rest,
+and she believed that, for herself, she had done so during the ten
+minutes that, thanks to her wish not to break off short, elapsed before
+she could gracefully withdraw. It then appeared, however, that Marian
+had been discussing still, and there was something that, at the last,
+Kate had to take up. "Whom do you mean by Aunt Maud's young man?"
+
+"Whom should I mean but Lord Mark?"
+
+"And where do you pick up such vulgar twaddle?" Kate demanded with her
+clear face. "How does such stuff, in this hole, get to you?"
+
+She had no sooner spoken than she asked herself what had become of the
+grace to which she had sacrificed. Marian certainly did little to save
+it, and nothing indeed was so inconsequent as her ground of complaint.
+She desired her to "work" Lancaster Gate as she believed that scene of
+abundance could be worked; but she now didn't see why advantage should
+be taken of the bloated connection to put an affront on her own poor
+home. She appeared in fact for the moment to take the position that
+Kate kept her in her "hole" and then heartlessly reflected on her being
+in it. Yet she didn't explain how she had picked up the report on which
+her sister had challenged her--so that it was thus left to her sister
+to see in it, once more, a sign of the creeping curiosity of the Miss
+Condrips. They lived in a deeper hole than Marian, but they kept their
+ear to the ground, they spent their days in prowling, whereas Marian,
+in garments and shoes that seemed steadily to grow looser and larger,
+never prowled. There were times when Kate wondered if the Miss Condrips
+were offered her by fate as a warning for her own future--to be taken
+as showing her what she herself might become at forty if she let things
+too recklessly go. What was expected of her by others--and by so many
+of them--could, all the same, on occasion, present itself as beyond a
+joke; and this was just now the aspect it particularly wore. She was
+not only to quarrel with Merton Densher to oblige her five
+spectators--with the Miss Condrips there were five; she was to set
+forth in pursuit of Lord Mark on some preposterous theory of the
+premium attached to success. Mrs. Lowder's hand had attached it, and it
+figured at the end of the course as a bell that would ring, break out
+into public clamour, as soon as touched. Kate reflected sharply enough
+on the weak points of this fond fiction, with the result at last of a
+certain chill for her sister's confidence; though Mrs. Condrip still
+took refuge in the plea--which was after all the great point--that
+their aunt would be munificent when their aunt should be pleased. The
+exact identity of her candidate was a detail; what was of the essence
+was her conception of the kind of match it was open to her niece to
+make with her aid. Marian always spoke of marriages as "matches," but
+that was again a detail. Mrs. Lowder's "aid" meanwhile awaited them--if
+not to light the way to Lord Mark, then to somebody better. Marian
+would put up, in fine, with somebody better; she only wouldn't put up
+with somebody so much worse. Kate had, once more, to go through all
+this before a graceful issue was reached. It was reached by her paying
+with the sacrifice of Mr. Densher for her reduction of Lord Mark to the
+absurd. So they separated softly enough. She was to be let off hearing
+about Lord Mark so long as she made it good that she wasn't underhand
+about anybody else. She had denied everything and every one, she
+reflected as she went away--and that was a relief; but it also made
+rather a clean sweep of the future. The prospect put on a bareness that
+already gave her something in common with the Miss Condrips.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SECOND
+
+III
+
+Merton Densher, who passed the best hours of each night at the office
+of his newspaper, had at times, during the day, to make up for it, a
+sense, or at least an appearance, of leisure, in accordance with which
+he was not infrequently to be met, in different parts of the town, at
+moments when men of business are hidden from the public eye. More than
+once, during the present winter's end, he had deviated, toward three
+o'clock, or toward four, into Kensington Gardens, where he might for a
+while, on each occasion, have been observed to demean himself as a
+person with nothing to do. He made his way indeed, for the most part,
+with a certain directness, over to the north side; but once that ground
+was reached his behaviour was noticeably wanting in point. He moved
+seemingly at random from alley to alley; he stopped for no reason and
+remained idly agaze; he sat down in a chair and then changed to a
+bench; after which he walked about again, only again to repeat both the
+vagueness and the vivacity. Distinctly, he was a man either with
+nothing at all to do or with ever so much to think about; and it was
+not to be denied that the impression he might often thus easily make
+had the effect of causing the burden of proof, in certain directions,
+to rest on him. It was a little the fault of his aspect, his personal
+marks, which made it almost impossible to name his profession.
+
+He was a longish, leanish, fairish young Englishman, not unamenable, on
+certain sides, to classification--as for instance by being a gentleman,
+by being rather specifically one of the educated, one of the generally
+sound and generally pleasant; 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. On the other hand he was
+credulous for diplomacy, or perhaps even for science, while he was
+perhaps at the same time too much in his mere senses for poetry, and
+yet too little in them for art. 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; of
+his straight hair and his well-shaped head, never, the latter, neatly
+smooth, and apt, into the bargain, at the time of quite other calls
+upon it, to throw itself suddenly back and, supported behind by his
+uplifted arms and interlocked hands, place him for unconscionable
+periods in communion with the ceiling, the tree-tops, the sky. He was
+in short visibly absent-minded, irregularly clever, liable to drop what
+was near and to take up what was far; he was more a respecter, in
+general, than a follower of custom. He suggested above all, however,
+that wondrous state of youth in which the elements, the metals more or
+less precious, are so in fusion and fermentation that the question of
+the final stamp, the pressure that fixes the value, must wait for
+comparative coolness. And it was a mark of his interesting mixture that
+if he was irritable it was by a law of considerable subtlety--a law
+that, in intercourse with him, it might be of profit, though not easy,
+to master. One of the effects of it was that he had for you surprises
+of tolerance as well as of temper.
+
+He loitered, on the best of the relenting days, the several occasions
+we speak of, along the part of the Gardens nearest to Lancaster Gate,
+and when, always, in due time, Kate Croy came out of her aunt's house,
+crossed the road and arrived by the nearest entrance, there was a
+general publicity in the proceeding which made it slightly anomalous.
+If their meeting was to be bold and free it might have taken place
+within doors; if it was to be shy or secret it might have taken place
+almost anywhere better than under Mrs. Lowder's windows. They failed
+indeed to remain attached to that spot; they wandered and strolled,
+taking in the course of more than one of these interviews a
+considerable walk, or else picked out a couple of chairs under one of
+the great trees and sat as much apart--apart from every one else--as
+possible. But Kate had, each time, at first, the air of wishing to
+expose herself to pursuit and capture if those things were in question.
+She made the point that she was not underhand, any more than she was
+vulgar; that the Gardens were charming in themselves and this use of
+them a matter of taste; and that, if her aunt chose to glare at her
+from the drawing-room or to cause her to be tracked and overtaken, she
+could at least make it convenient that this should be easily done. The
+fact was that the relation between these young persons abounded in such
+oddities as were not inaptly symbolised by assignations that had a good
+deal more appearance than motive. Of the strength of the tie that held
+them we shall sufficiently take the measure; but it was meanwhile
+almost obvious that if the great possibility had come up for them it
+had done so, to an exceptional degree, under the protection of the
+famous law of contraries. Any deep harmony that might eventually govern
+them would not be the result of their having much in common--having
+anything, in fact, but their affection; and would really find its
+explanation in some sense, on the part of each, of being poor where the
+other was rich. It is nothing new indeed that generous young persons
+often admire most what nature hasn't given them--from which it would
+appear, after all, that our friends were both generous.
+
+Merton Densher had repeatedly said to himself--and from far back--that
+he should be a fool not to marry a woman whose value would be in her
+differences; and Kate Croy, though without having quite so
+philosophised, had quickly recognised in the young man a precious
+unlikeness. He represented what her life had never given her and
+certainly, without some such aid as his, never would give her; all the
+high, dim things she lumped together as of the mind. It was on the side
+of the mind that Densher was rich for her, and mysterious and strong;
+and he had rendered her in especial the sovereign service of making
+that element real. She had had, all her days, to take it terribly on
+trust; no creature she had ever encountered having been able in any
+degree to testify for it directly. Vague rumours of its existence had
+made their precarious way to her; but nothing had, on the whole, struck
+her as more likely than that she should live and die without the chance
+to verify them. The chance had come--it was an extraordinary one--on
+the day she first met Densher; and it was to the girl's lasting honour
+that she knew on the spot what she was in the presence of. That
+occasion indeed, for everything that straightway flowered in 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 recognition. 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 possess. 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, ingenious 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 beginning.
+
+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 delight of the town, an American reciter, the joy
+of a kindred people, an Hungarian fiddler, the wonder 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 convoked. She
+lived under her mother's roof, as she considered, obscurely, and was
+acquainted with few persons who entertained on that scale; but she had
+had dealings with two or three connected, as appeared, with such--two
+or three through whom the stream of hospitality, filtered or diffused,
+could thus now and then spread to outlying receptacles. A good-natured
+lady in fine, a friend of her mother and a relative of the lady of the
+gallery, had offered to take her to the party in question and had there
+fortified her, further, with two or three of those introductions that,
+at large parties, lead to other things--that had at any rate, on this
+occasion, culminated for her in conversation with a tall, fair,
+slightly unbrushed and rather awkward, but on the whole not dreary,
+young man. The young man had affected her as detached, as--it was
+indeed what he called himself--awfully at sea, as much more distinct
+from what surrounded them than any one else appeared to be, and even as
+probably quite disposed to be making his escape when pulled up to be
+placed in relation with her. He gave her his word for it indeed, that
+same evening, that only their meeting had prevented his flight, but
+that now he saw how sorry he should have been to miss it. This point
+they had reached by midnight, and though in respect to such remarks
+everything was in the tone, the tone was by midnight there too. 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. It wasn't, in a word, simply that their eyes
+had met; other conscious organs, faculties, feelers had met as well,
+and when Kate afterwards imaged to herself the sharp, deep fact she saw
+it, in the oddest way, as a particular performance. She had observed a
+ladder against a garden wall, and had trusted herself so to climb it as
+to be able to see over into the probable garden on the other side. On
+reaching the top she had found herself face to face with a gentleman
+engaged in a like calculation at the same moment, and the two inquirers
+had remained confronted on their ladders. The great point was that for
+the rest of that evening they had been perched--they had not climbed
+down; and indeed, during the time that followed, Kate at least had had
+the perched feeling--it was as if she were there aloft without a
+retreat. A simpler expression of all this is doubtless but that they
+had taken each other in with interest; and without a happy hazard six
+months later the incident would have closed in that account of it. The
+accident, meanwhile, had been as natural as anything in London ever is:
+Kate had one afternoon found herself opposite Mr. Densher on the
+Underground Railway. She had entered the train at Sloane Square to go
+to Queen's Road, and the carriage in which she had found a place was
+all but full. Densher was already in it--on the other bench and at the
+furthest angle; she was sure of him before they had again started. The
+day and the hour were darkness, there were six other persons, and she
+had been busy placing herself; but her consciousness had gone to him as
+straight as if they had come together in some bright level of the
+desert. They had on neither part a second's hesitation; they looked
+across the choked compartment exactly as if she had known he would be
+there and he had expected her to come in; so that, though in the
+conditions they could only exchange the greeting of movements, smiles,
+silence, it would have been quite in the key of these passages that
+they should have alighted for ease at the very next station. Kate was
+in fact sure that the very next station was the young man's true
+goal--which made it clear that he was going on only from the wish to
+speak to her. He had to go on, for this purpose, to High Street,
+Kensington, as it was not till then that the exit of a passenger gave
+him his chance.
+
+His chance put him, however, in quick possession of the seat facing
+her, the alertness of his capture of which seemed to show her his
+impatience. It helped them, moreover, with strangers on either side,
+little to talk; though this very restriction perhaps made such a mark
+for them as nothing else could have done. If the fact that their
+opportunity had again come round for them could be so intensely
+expressed between them without a word, they might very well feel on the
+spot that it had not come round for nothing. The extraordinary part of
+the matter was that they were not in the least meeting where they had
+left off, but ever so much further on, and that these added links added
+still another between High Street and Notting Hill Gate, and then
+between the latter station and Queen's Road an extension really
+inordinate. At Notting Hill Gate, Kate's right-hand neighbour
+descended, whereupon Densher popped straight into that seat; only there
+was not much gained when a lady, the next instant, popped into
+Densher's. He could say almost nothing to her--she scarce knew, at
+least, what he said; she was so occupied with a certainty that one of
+the persons opposite, a youngish man with a single eyeglass, which he
+kept constantly in position, had made her out from the first as
+visibly, as strangely affected. If such a person made her out, what
+then did Densher do?--a question in truth sufficiently answered when,
+on their reaching her station, he instantly followed her out of the
+train. That had been the real beginning--the beginning of everything
+else; the other time, the time at the party, had been but the beginning
+of _that._ Never in life before had she so let herself go; for always
+before--so far as small adventures could have been in question for
+her--there had been, by the vulgar measure, more to go upon. He had
+walked with her to Lancaster Gate, and then she had walked with him
+away from it--for all the world, she said to herself, like the
+housemaid giggling to the baker.
+
+This appearance, she was afterwards to feel, had been all in order for
+a relation that might precisely best be described in the terms of the
+baker and the housemaid. She could say to herself that from that hour
+they had kept company; that had come to represent, technically
+speaking, alike the range and the limit of their tie. He had on the
+spot, naturally, asked leave to call upon her--which, as a young person
+who wasn't really young, who didn't pretend to be a sheltered flower,
+she as rationally gave. That--she was promptly clear about it--was now
+her only possible basis; she was just the contemporary London female,
+highly modern, inevitably battered, honourably free. She had of course
+taken her aunt straight into her confidence--had gone through the form
+of asking her leave; and she subsequently remembered that though, on
+this occasion, she had left the history of her new alliance as scant as
+the facts themselves, Mrs. Lowder had struck her at the time
+surprisingly mild. It had been, in every way, the occasion, full of the
+reminder that her hostess was deep: it was definitely then that she had
+begun to ask herself what Aunt Maud was, in vulgar parlance, "up to."
+"You may receive, my dear, whom you like"--that was what Aunt Maud, who
+in general objected to people's doing as they liked, had replied; and
+it bore, this unexpectedness, a good deal of looking into. There were
+many explanations, and they were all amusing--amusing, that is, in the
+line of the sombre and brooding amusement, cultivated by Kate in her
+actual high retreat. Merton Densher came the very next Sunday; but Mrs.
+Lowder was so consistently magnanimous as to make it possible to her
+niece to see him alone. She saw him, however, on the Sunday following,
+in order to invite him to dinner; and when, after dining, he came
+again--which he did three times, she found means to treat his visit as
+preponderantly to herself. Kate's conviction that she didn't like him
+made that remarkable; it added to the evidence, by this time
+voluminous, that she was remarkable all round. If she had been, in the
+way of energy, merely usual, she would have kept her dislike direct;
+whereas it was now as if she were seeking to know him in order to see
+best where to "have" him. That was one of the reflections made in our
+young woman's high retreat; she smiled from her lookout, in the silence
+that was only the fact of hearing irrelevant sounds, as she caught the
+truth that you could easily accept people when you wanted them so to be
+delivered to you. When Aunt Maud wished them despatched, it was not to
+be done by deputy; it was clearly always a matter reserved for her own
+hand. But what made the girl wonder most was the implications of so
+much diplomacy in respect to her own value. What view might she take of
+her position in the light of this appearance that her companion feared
+so, as yet, to upset her? It was as if Densher were accepted partly
+under the dread that if he hadn't been she would act in resentment.
+Hadn't her aunt considered the danger that she would in that case have
+broken off, have seceded? The danger was exaggerated--she would have
+done nothing so gross; but that, it seemed, was the way Mrs. Lowder saw
+her and believed her to be reckoned with. What importance therefore did
+she really attach to her, what strange interest could she take on their
+keeping on terms? Her father and her sister had their answer to
+this--even without knowing how the question struck her; they saw the
+lady of Lancaster Gate as panting to make her fortune, and the
+explanation of that appetite was that, on the accident of a nearer view
+than she had before enjoyed, she had been charmed, been dazzled. They
+approved, they admired in her one of the belated fancies of rich,
+capricious, violent old women--the more marked, moreover, because the
+result of no plot; and they piled up the possible results for the
+person concerned. Kate knew what to think of her own power thus to
+carry by storm; she saw herself as handsome, no doubt, but as hard, and
+felt herself as clever but as cold; and as so much too imperfectly
+ambitious, furthermore, that it was a pity, for a quiet life, she
+couldn't settle to be either finely or stupidly indifferent. Her
+intelligence sometimes kept her still--too still--but her want of it
+was restless; so that she got the good, it seemed to her, of neither
+extreme. She saw herself at present, none the less, in a situation, and
+even her sad, disillusioned mother, dying, but with Aunt Maud
+interviewing the nurse on the stairs, had not failed to remind her that
+it was of the essence of situations to be, under Providence, worked.
+The dear woman had died in the belief that she was actually working the
+one then produced.
+
+Kate took one of her walks with Densher just after her visit to Mr.
+Croy; but most of it went, as usual, to their sitting in talk. They
+had, under the trees, by the lake, the air of old friends--phases of
+apparent earnestness, in particular, in which they might have been
+settling every question in their vast young world; and periods of
+silence, side by side, perhaps even more, when "a long engagement!"
+would have been the final reading of the signs on the part of a passer
+struck with them, as it was so easy to be. They would have presented
+themselves thus as very old friends rather than as young persons who
+had met for the first time but a year before and had spent most of the
+interval without contact. It was indeed for each, already, as if they
+were older friends; and though the succession of their meetings might,
+between them, have been straightened out, they only had a confused
+sense of a good many, very much alike, and a confused intention of a
+good many more, as little different as possible. The desire to keep
+them just as they were had perhaps to do with the fact that in spite of
+the presumed diagnosis of the stranger there had been for them as yet
+no formal, no final understanding. Densher had at the very first
+pressed the question, but that, it had been easy to reply, was too
+soon; 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, in
+London, remarkable, and for Marian not less--as Aunt Maud touched
+neither directly--the mystery had worked. No doubt she had been seen.
+Of course she had been seen. She had taken no trouble not to be seen,
+and it was a thing, clearly, she was incapable of taking. But she had
+been seen how?--and _what_ was there to see? She was in love--she knew
+that: but it was wholly her own business, and she had the sense of
+having conducted herself, of still so doing, with almost violent
+conformity.
+
+"I've an idea--in fact I feel sure--that Aunt Maud means to write to
+you; and I think you had better know it." So much as this she said to
+him as soon as they met, but immediately adding to it: "So as to make
+up your mind how to take her. I know pretty well what she'll say to
+you."
+
+"Then will you kindly tell me?"
+
+She thought a little. "I can't do that. I should spoil it. She'll do
+the best for her own idea."
+
+"Her idea, you mean, that I'm a sort of a scoundrel; or, at the best,
+not good enough for you?"
+
+They were side by side again in their penny chairs, and Kate had
+another pause. "Not good enough for _her."_
+
+"Oh, I see. And that's necessary."
+
+He put it as a truth rather more than as a question; but there had been
+plenty of truths between them that each had contradicted. Kate,
+however, let this one sufficiently pass, only saying the next moment:
+"She has behaved extraordinarily."
+
+"And so have we," Densher declared. "I think, you know, we've been
+awfully decent."
+
+"For ourselves, for each other, for people in general, yes. But not for
+_her._ For her," said Kate, "we've been monstrous. She has been giving
+us rope. So if she does send for you," the girl repeated, "you must
+know where you are."
+
+"That I always know. It's where _you_ are that concerns me."
+
+"Well," said Kate after an instant, "her idea of that is what you'll
+have from her." He gave her a long look, and whatever else people who
+wouldn't let her alone might have wished, for her advancement, his long
+looks were the thing in the world she could never have enough of. What
+she felt was that, whatever might happen, she must keep them, must make
+them most completely her possession; and it was already strange enough
+that she reasoned, or at all events began to act, as if she might work
+them in with other and alien things, privately cherish them, and yet,
+as regards the rigour of it, pay no price. She looked it well in the
+face, she took it intensely home, that they were lovers; she rejoiced
+to herself and, frankly, to him, in their wearing of the name; but,
+distinguished creature that, in her way, she was, she took a view of
+this character that scarce squared with the conventional. The character
+itself she insisted on as their right, taking that so for granted that
+it didn't seem even bold; but Densher, though he agreed with her, found
+himself moved to wonder at her simplifications, her values. Life might
+prove difficult--was evidently going to; but meanwhile they had each
+other, and that was everything. This was her reasoning, but meanwhile,
+for _him,_ each other was what they didn't have, and it was just the
+point. Repeatedly, however, it was a point that, in the face of strange
+and special things, he judged it rather awkwardly gross to urge. It was
+impossible to keep Mrs. Lowder out of their scheme. She stood there too
+close to it and too solidly; it had to open a gate, at a given point,
+do what they would to take her in. And she came in, always, while they
+sat together rather helplessly watching her, as in a coach-in-four; she
+drove round their prospect as the principal lady at the circus drives
+round the ring, and she stopped the coach in the middle to alight with
+majesty. It was our young man's sense that she was magnificently
+vulgar, but yet, quite, that this wasn't all. It wasn't with her
+vulgarity that she felt his want of means, though that might have
+helped her richly to embroider it; nor was it with the same infirmity
+that she was strong, original, dangerous.
+
+His want of means--of means sufficient for anyone but himself--was
+really the great ugliness, and was, moreover, at no time more ugly for
+him than when it rose there, as it did seem to rise, shameless, face to
+face with the elements in Kate's life colloquially and conveniently
+classed by both of them as funny. He sometimes indeed, for that matter,
+asked himself if these elements were as funny as the innermost fact, so
+often vivid to him, of his own consciousness--his private inability to
+believe he should ever be rich. His conviction on this head was in
+truth quite positive and a thing by itself; he failed, after analysis,
+to understand it, though he had naturally more lights on it than any
+one else. He knew how it subsisted in spite of an equal consciousness
+of his being neither mentally nor physically quite helpless, neither a
+dunce nor a cripple; he knew it to be absolute, though secret, and
+also, strange to say, about common undertakings, not discouraging, not
+prohibitive. Only now was he having to think if it were prohibitive in
+respect to marriage; only now, for the first time, had he to weigh his
+case in scales. The scales, as he sat with Kate, often dangled in the
+line of his vision; he saw them, large and black, while he talked or
+listened, take, in the bright air, singular positions. Sometimes the
+right was down and sometimes the left; never a happy equipoise--one or
+the other always kicking the beam. Thus was kept before him the
+question of whether it were more ignoble to ask a woman to take her
+chance with you, or to accept it from one's conscience that her chance
+could be at the best but one of the degrees of privation; whether, too,
+otherwise, marrying for money mightn't after all be a smaller cause of
+shame than the mere dread of marrying without. Through these variations
+of mood and view, all the same, the mark on his forehead stood clear;
+he saw himself remain without whether he married or not. It was a line
+on which his fancy could be admirably active; the innumerable ways of
+making money were beautifully present to him; he could have handled
+them, for his newspaper, as easily as he handled everything. He was
+quite aware how he handled everything; it was another mark on his
+forehead; the pair of smudges from the thumb of fortune, the brand on
+the passive fleece, dated from the primal hour and kept each other
+company. He wrote, as for print, with deplorable ease; since there had
+been nothing to stop him even at the age of ten, so there was as little
+at twenty; it was part of his fate in the first place and part of the
+wretched public's in the second. The innumerable ways of making money
+were, no doubt, at all events, what his imagination often was busy with
+after he had tilted his chair and thrown back his head with his hands
+clasped behind it. What would most have prolonged that attitude,
+moreover, was the reflection that the ways were ways only for others.
+Within the minute, now--however this might be--he was aware of a nearer
+view than he had yet quite had of those circumstances on his
+companion's part that made least for simplicity of relation. He saw
+above all how she saw them herself, for she spoke of them at present
+with the last frankness, telling him of her visit to her father and
+giving him, in an account of her subsequent scene with her sister, an
+instance of how she was perpetually reduced to patching up, in one way
+or another, that unfortunate woman's hopes.
+
+"The tune," she exclaimed, "to which we're a failure as a family!" With
+which he had it again all from her--and this time, as it seemed to him,
+more than all: the dishonour her father had brought them, his folly and
+cruelty and wickedness; the wounded state of her mother, abandoned,
+despoiled and helpless, yet, for the management of such a home as
+remained to them, dreadfully unreasonable too; the extinction of her
+two young brothers--one, at nineteen, the eldest of the house, by
+typhoid fever, contracted at a poisonous little place, as they had
+afterwards found out, that they had taken for a summer; the other, the
+flower of the flock, a middy on the _Britannia,_ dreadfully drowned,
+and not even by an accident at sea, but by cramp, unrescued, while
+bathing, too late in the autumn, in a wretched little river during a
+holiday visit to the home of a shipmate. Then Marian's unnatural
+marriage, in itself a kind of spiritless turning of the other cheek to
+fortune: her actual wretchedness and plaintiveness, her greasy
+children, her impossible claims, her odious visitors--these things
+completed the proof of the heaviness, for them all, of the hand of
+fate. Kate confessedly described them with an excess of impatience; it
+was much of her charm for Densher that she gave in general that turn to
+her descriptions, partly as if to amuse him by free and humorous
+colour, partly--and that charm was the greatest--as if to work off, for
+her own relief, her constant perception of the incongruity of things.
+She had seen the general show too early and too sharply, and she was so
+intelligent that she knew it and allowed for that misfortune; therefore
+when, in talk with him, she was violent and almost unfeminine, it was
+almost as if they had settled, for intercourse, on the short cut of the
+fantastic and the happy language of exaggeration. It had come to be
+definite between them at a primary stage that, if they could have no
+other straight way, the realm of thought at least was open to them.
+They could think whatever they liked about whatever they would--or, in
+other words, they could say it. Saying it for each other, for each
+other alone, only of course added to the taste. The implication was
+thereby constant that what they said when not together had no taste for
+them at all, and nothing could have served more to launch them, at
+special hours, on their small floating island than such an assumption
+that they were only making believe everywhere else. Our young man, it
+must be added, was conscious enough that it was Kate who profited most
+by this particular play of the fact of intimacy. It always seemed to
+him that she had more life than he to react from, and when she
+recounted the dark disasters of her house and glanced at the hard, odd
+offset of her present exaltation--since as exaltation it was apparently
+to be considered--he felt his own grey domestic annals to make little
+show. It was naturally, in all such reference, the question of her
+father's character that engaged him most, but her picture of her
+adventure in Chirk Street gave him a sense of how little as yet that
+character was clear to him. What was it, to speak plainly, that Mr.
+Croy had originally done?
+
+"I don't know--and I don't want to. I only know that years and years
+ago--when I was about fifteen--something or other happened that made
+him impossible. I mean impossible for the world at large first, and
+then, little by little, for mother. We of course didn't know it at the
+time," Kate explained, "but we knew it later; and it was, oddly enough,
+my sister who first made out that he had done something. I can hear her
+now--the way, one cold, black Sunday morning when, on account of an
+extraordinary fog, we had not gone to church, she broke it to me by the
+school-room fire. I was reading a history-book by the lamp--when we
+didn't go to church we had to read history-books--and I suddenly heard
+her say, out of the fog, which was in the room, and _apropos_ of
+nothing: 'Papa has done something wicked.' And the curious thing was
+that I believed it on the spot and have believed it ever since, though
+she could tell me nothing more--neither what was the wickedness, nor
+how she knew, nor what would happen to him, nor anything else about it.
+We had our sense, always, that all sorts of things _had_ happened, were
+all the while happening, to him; so that when Marian only said she was
+sure, tremendously sure, that she had made it out for herself, but that
+that was enough, I took her word for it--it seemed somehow so natural.
+We were not, however, to ask mother--which made it more natural still,
+and I said never a word. But mother, strangely enough, spoke of it to
+me, in time, of her own accord very much later on. He hadn't been with
+us for ever so long, but we were used to that. She must have had some
+fear, some conviction that I had an idea, some idea of her own that it
+was the best thing to do. She came out as abruptly as Marian had done:
+'If you hear anything against your father--anything I mean, except that
+he's odious and vile--remember it's perfectly false.' That was the way
+I knew--it was true, though I recall that I said to her then that I of
+course knew it wasn't. She might have told me it was true, and yet have
+trusted me to contradict fiercely enough any accusation of him that I
+should meet--to contradict it much more fiercely and effectively, I
+think, than she would have done herself. As it happens, however," the
+girl went on, "I've never had occasion, and I've been conscious of it
+with a sort of surprise. It has made the world, at times, seem more
+decent. No one has so much as breathed to me. That has been a part of
+the silence, the silence that surrounds him, the silence that, for the
+world, has washed him out. He doesn't exist for people. And yet I'm as
+sure as ever. In fact, though I know no more than I did then, I'm more
+sure. And that," she wound up, "is what I sit here and tell you about
+my own father. If you don't call it a proof of confidence I don't know
+what will satisfy you."
+
+"It satisfies me beautifully," Densher declared, "but it doesn't, my
+dear child, very greatly enlighten me. You don't, you know, really tell
+me anything. It's so vague that what am I to think but that you may
+very well be mistaken? What has he done, if no one can name it?"
+
+"He has done everything."
+
+"Oh--everything! Everything's nothing."
+
+"Well then," said Kate, "he has done some particular thing. It's
+known--only, thank God, not to us. But it has been the end of him. You
+could doubtless find out with a little trouble. You can ask about."
+
+Densher for a moment said nothing; but the next moment he made it up.
+"I wouldn't find out for the world, and I'd rather lose my tongue than
+put a question."
+
+"And yet it's a part of me," said Kate.
+
+"A part of you?"
+
+"My father's dishonour." Then she sounded for him, but more deeply than
+ever yet, her note of proud, still pessimism. "How can such a thing as
+that not be the great thing in one's life?"
+
+She had to take from him again, on this, one of his long looks, and she
+took it to its deepest, its headiest dregs. "I shall ask you, for the
+great thing in your life," he said, "to depend on _me_ a little more."
+After which, just hesitating, "Doesn't he belong to some club?" he
+inquired.
+
+She had a grave headshake. "He used to--to many."
+
+"But he has dropped them?"
+
+"They've dropped _him._ Of that I'm sure. It ought to do for you. I
+offered him," the girl immediately continued--"and it was for that I
+went to him--to come and be with him, make a home for him so far as is
+possible. But he won't hear of it."
+
+Densher took this in with visible, but generous, wonder. "You offered
+him--'impossible' as you describe him to me--to live with him and share
+his disadvantages?" The young man saw for the moment but the high
+beauty of it. "You _are_ gallant!"
+
+"Because it strikes you as being brave for him?" She wouldn't in the
+least have this. "It wasn't courage--it was the opposite. I did it to
+save myself--to escape."
+
+He had his air, so constant at this stage, as of her giving him finer
+things than any one to think about. "Escape from what?"
+
+"From everything."
+
+"Do you by any chance mean from me?"
+
+"No; I spoke to him of you, told him--or what amounted to it--that I
+would bring you, if he would allow it, with me."
+
+"But he won't allow it," said Densher.
+
+"Won't hear of it on any terms. He won't help me, won't save me, won't
+hold out a finger to me," Kate went on; "he simply wriggles away, in
+his inimitable manner, and throws me back."
+
+"Back then, after all, thank goodness," Densher concurred, "on me."
+
+But she spoke again as with the sole vision of the whole scene she had
+evoked. "It's a pity, because you'd like him. He's wonderful--he's
+charming." Her companion gave one of the laughs that marked in him,
+again, his feeling in her tone, inveterately, something that banished
+the talk of other women, so far as he knew other women, to the dull
+desert of the conventional, and she had already continued. "He would
+make himself delightful to you."
+
+"Even while objecting to me?"
+
+"Well, he likes to please," the girl explained--"personally. He would
+appreciate you and be clever with you. It's to _me_ he objects--that is
+as to my liking you."
+
+"Heaven be praised then," Densher exclaimed, "that you like me enough
+for the objection!"
+
+But she met it after an instant with some inconsequence. "I don't. I
+offered to give you up, if necessary, to go to him. But it made no
+difference, and that's what I mean," she pursued, "by his declining me
+on any terms. The point is, you see, that I don't escape."
+
+Densher wondered. "But if you didn't wish to escape _me?"_
+
+"I wished to escape Aunt Maud. But he insists that it's through her and
+through her only that I may help him; just as Marian insists that it's
+through her, and through her only, that I can help _her._ That's what I
+mean," she again explained, "by their turning me back."
+
+The young man thought. "Your sister turns you back too?"
+
+"Oh, with a push!"
+
+"But have you offered to live with your sister?"
+
+"I would in a moment if she'd have me. That's all my virtue--a narrow
+little family feeling. I've a small stupid piety--I don't know what to
+call it." Kate bravely sustained it; she made it out. "Sometimes,
+alone, I've to smother my shrieks when I think of my poor mother. She
+went through things--they pulled her down; I know what they were now--I
+didn't then, for I was a pig; and my position, compared with hers, is
+an insolence of success. That's what Marian keeps before me; that's
+what papa himself, as I say, so inimitably does. My position's a value,
+a great value, for them both"--she followed and followed. Lucid and
+ironic, she knew no merciful muddle. "It's _the_ value--the only one
+they have."
+
+Everything between our young couple moved today, in spite of their
+pauses, their margin, to a quicker measure--the quickness and anxiety
+playing lightning-like in the sultriness. Densher watched, decidedly,
+as he had never done before. "And the fact you speak of holds you!"
+
+"Of course, it holds me. It's a perpetual sound in my ears. It makes me
+ask myself if I've any right to personal happiness, any right to
+anything but to be as rich and overflowing, as smart and shining, as I
+can be made."
+
+Densher had a pause. "Oh, you might, with good luck, have the personal
+happiness too."
+
+Her immediate answer to this was a silence like his own; after which
+she gave him straight in the face, but quite simply and quietly:
+"Darling!"
+
+It took him another moment; then he was also quiet and simple. "Will
+you settle it by our being married to-morrow--as we can, with perfect
+ease, civilly?"
+
+"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?"
+
+As soon as he had permitted himself this qualification of the
+unfortunate persons she so perversely cherished, he repented of his
+roughness--and partly because he expected a flash from her. But it was
+one of her finest sides that she sometimes flashed with a mere mild
+glow. "I don't see why you don't make out a little more that if we
+avoid stupidity we may do _all._ We may keep her."
+
+He stared. "Make her pension us?"
+
+"Well, wait at least till we have seen."
+
+He thought. "Seen what can be got out of her?"
+
+Kate for a moment said nothing. "After all I never asked her; never,
+when our troubles were at the worst, appealed to her nor went near her.
+She fixed upon me herself, settled on me with her wonderful gilded
+claws."
+
+"You speak," Densher observed, "as if she were a vulture."
+
+"Call it an eagle--with a gilded beak as well, and with wings for great
+flights. If she's a thing of the air, in short--say at once a
+balloon--I never myself got into her car. I was her choice."
+
+It had really, her sketch of the affair, a high colour and a great
+style; at all of which he gazed a minute as at a picture by a master.
+"What she must see in you!"
+
+"Wonders!" And, speaking it loud, she stood straight up. "Everything.
+There it is."
+
+Yes, there it was, and as she remained before him he continued to face
+it. "So that what you mean is that I'm to do my part in somehow
+squaring her?"
+
+"See her, see her," Kate said with impatience.
+
+"And grovel to her?"
+
+"Ah, do what you like!" And she walked in her impatience away.
+
+
+IV
+
+His eyes had followed her at this time quite long enough, before he
+overtook her, to make out more than ever, in the poise of her head, the
+pride of her step--he didn't know what best to call it--a part, at
+least, of Mrs. Lowder's reasons. He consciously winced while he figured
+his presenting himself as a reason opposed to these; though, at the
+same moment, with the source of Aunt Maud's inspiration thus before
+him, he was prepared to conform, by almost any abject attitude or
+profitable compromise, to his companion's easy injunction. He would do
+as _she_ liked--his own liking might come off as it would. He would
+help her to the utmost of his power; for, all the rest of that day and
+the next, her easy injunction, tossed off that way as she turned her
+beautiful back, was like the crack of a great whip in the blue air, the
+high element in which Mrs. Lowder hung. He wouldn't grovel perhaps--he
+wasn't quite ready for that; but he would be patient, ridiculous,
+reasonable, unreasonable, and above all deeply diplomatic. He would be
+clever, with all his cleverness--which he now shook hard, as he
+sometimes shook his poor, dear, shabby, old watch, to start it up
+again. It wasn't, thank goodness, as if there weren't plenty of that,
+and with what they could muster between them it would be little to the
+credit of their star, however pale, that defeat and
+surrender--surrender so early, so immediate--should have to ensue. It
+was not indeed that he thought of that disaster as, at the worst, a
+direct sacrifice of their possibilities: he imaged--it which was enough
+as some proved vanity, some exposed fatuity, in the idea of bringing
+Mrs. Lowder round. When, shortly afterwards, in this lady's vast
+drawing-room--the apartments at Lancaster Gate had struck him from the
+first as of prodigious extent--he awaited her, at her request, conveyed
+in a "reply-paid" telegram, his theory was that of their still clinging
+to their idea, though with a sense of the difficulty of it really
+enlarged to the scale of the place.
+
+He had the place for a long time--it seemed to him a quarter of an
+hour--to himself; and while Aunt Maud kept him and kept him, while
+observation and reflection crowded on him, he asked himself what was to
+be expected of a person who could treat one like that. The visit, the
+hour were of her own proposing, so that her delay, no doubt, was but
+part of a general plan of putting him to inconvenience. As he walked to
+and fro, however, taking in the message of her massive, florid
+furniture, the immense expression of her signs and symbols, he had as
+little doubt of the inconvenience he was prepared to suffer. He found
+himself even facing the thought that he had nothing to fall back on,
+and that that was as great a humiliation in a good cause as a proud man
+could desire. It had not yet been so distinct to him that he made no
+show--literally not the smallest; so complete a show seemed made there
+all about him; so almost abnormally affirmative, so aggressively erect,
+were the huge, heavy objects that syllabled his hostess story. "When
+all's said and done, you know, she's colossally vulgar"--he had once
+all but said that of Mrs. Lowder to her niece; only just keeping it
+back at the last, keeping it to himself with all its danger about it.
+It mattered because it bore so directly, and he at all events quite
+felt it a thing that Kate herself would some day bring out to him. It
+bore directly at present, and really all the more that somehow,
+strangely, it didn't in the least imply that Aunt Maud was dull or
+stale. She was vulgar with freshness, almost with beauty, since there
+was beauty, to a degree, in the play of so big and bold a temperament.
+She was in fine quite the largest possible quantity to deal with; and
+he was in the cage of the lioness without his whip--the whip, in a
+word, of a supply of proper retorts. He had no retort but that he loved
+the girl--which in such a house as that was painfully cheap. Kate had
+mentioned to him more than once that her aunt was Passionate, speaking
+of it as a kind of offset and uttering it as with a capital P, marking
+it as something that he might, that he in fact ought to, turn about in
+some way to their advantage. He wondered at this hour to what advantage
+he could turn it; but the case grew less simple the longer he waited.
+Decidedly there was something he hadn't enough of. He stood as one fast.
+
+His slow march to and fro seemed to give him the very measure; as he
+paced and paced the distance it became the desert of his poverty; at
+the sight of which expanse moreover he could pretend to himself as
+little as before that the desert looked redeemable. Lancaster Gate
+looked rich--that was all the effect; which it was unthinkable that any
+state of his own should ever remotely resemble. He read more vividly,
+more critically, as has been hinted, the appearances about him; and
+they did nothing so much as make him wonder at his aesthetic reaction.
+He hadn't known--and in spite of Kate's repeated reference to her own
+rebellions of taste--that he should "mind" so much how an independent
+lady might decorate her house. It was the language of the house itself
+that spoke to him, writing out for him, with surpassing breadth and
+freedom, the associations and conceptions, the ideals and possibilities
+of the mistress. Never, he flattered himself, had he seen anything so
+gregariously ugly--operatively, ominously so cruel. He was glad to have
+found this last name for the whole character; "cruel" somehow played
+into the subject for an article--that his impression put straight into
+his mind. He would write about the heavy horrors that could still
+flourish, that lifted their undiminished heads, in an age so proud of
+its short way with false gods; and it would be funny if what he should
+have got from Mrs. Lowder were to prove, after all, but a small amount
+of copy. Yet the great thing, really the dark thing, was that, even
+while he thought of the quick column he might add up, he felt it less
+easy to laugh at the heavy horrors than to quail before them. He
+couldn't describe and dismiss them collectively, call them either
+Mid-Victorian or Early; not being at all sure they were rangeable under
+one rubric. It was only manifest they were splendid and were
+furthermore conclusively British. They constituted an order and they
+abounded in rare material--precious woods, metals, stuffs, stones. He
+had never dreamed of anything so fringed and scalloped, so buttoned and
+corded, drawn everywhere so tight, and curled everywhere so thick. He
+had never dreamed of so much gilt and glass, so much satin and plush,
+so much rosewood and marble and malachite. But it was, above all, the
+solid forms, the wasted finish, the misguided cost, the general
+attestation of morality and money, a good conscience and a big balance.
+These things finally represented for him a portentous negation of his
+own world of thought--of which, for that matter, in the presence of
+them, he became as for the first time hopelessly aware. They revealed
+it to him by their merciless difference. His interview with Aunt Maud,
+none the less, took by no means the turn he had expected. Passionate
+though her nature, no doubt Mrs. Lowder, on this occasion, neither
+threatened nor appealed. Her arms of aggression, her weapons of
+defence, were presumably close at hand, but she left them untouched and
+unmentioned, and was in fact so bland that he properly perceived only
+afterwards how adroit she had been. He properly perceived something
+else as well, which complicated his case; he shouldn't have known what
+to call it if he hadn't called it her really imprudent good-nature. Her
+blandness, in other words, was not mere policy--he wasn't dangerous
+enough for policy; it was the result, he could see, of her fairly
+liking him a little. From the moment she did that she herself became
+more interesting; and who knew what might happen should he take to
+liking _her?_ Well, it was a risk he naturally must face. She fought
+him, at any rate, but with one hand, with a few loose grains of stray
+powder. He recognised at the end of ten minutes, and even without her
+explaining it, that if she had made him wait it had not been to wound
+him; they had by that time almost directly met on the fact of her
+intention. She had wanted him to think for himself of what she proposed
+to say to him--not having otherwise announced it; wanted to let it come
+home to him on the spot, as she had shrewdly believed it would. Her
+first question, on appearing, had practically been as to whether he
+hadn't taken her hint, and this inquiry assumed so many things that it
+made discussion, immediately, frank and large. He knew, with the
+question put, that the hint was just what he _had_ taken; knew that she
+had made him quickly forgive her the display of her power; knew that if
+he didn't take care he should understand her, and the strength of her
+purpose, to say nothing of that of her imagination, nothing of the
+length of her purse, only too well. Yet he pulled himself up with the
+thought, too, that he was not going to be afraid of understanding her;
+he was just going to understand and understand without detriment to the
+feeblest, even, of his passions. The play of one's mind let one in, at
+the best, dreadfully, in action, in the need of action, where
+simplicity was all; but when one couldn't prevent it the thing was to
+make it complete. There would never be mistakes but for the original
+fun of mistakes. What he must use his fatal intelligence for was to
+resist. Mrs. Lowder, meanwhile, might use it for whatever she liked.
+
+It was after she had begun her statement of her own idea about Kate
+that he began, on his side, to reflect that--with her manner of
+offering it as really sufficient if he would take the trouble to
+embrace--it she couldn't half hate him. That was all, positively, she
+seemed to show herself for the time as attempting; clearly, if she did
+her intention justice, she would have nothing more disagreeable to do.
+"If I hadn't been ready to go very much further, you understand, I
+wouldn't have gone so far. I don't care what you repeat to her--the
+more you repeat to her, perhaps the better; and, at any rate, there's
+nothing she doesn't already know. I don't say it for her; I say it for
+you--when I want to reach my niece I know how to do it straight." So
+Aunt Maud delivered herself--as with homely benevolence, in the
+simplest, but the clearest terms; virtually conveying that, though a
+word to the wise was, doubtless, in spite of the advantage, _not_
+always enough, a word to the good could never fail to be. The sense our
+young man read into her words was that she liked him because he was
+good--was really, by her measure, good enough: good enough, that is, to
+give up her niece for her and go his way in peace. But _was_ he good
+enough--by his own measure? He fairly wondered, while she more fully
+expressed herself, if it might be his doom to prove so. "She's the
+finest possible creature--of course you flatter yourself that you know
+it. But I know it, quite as well as you possibly can--by which I mean a
+good deal better yet; and the tune to which I'm ready to prove my faith
+compares favourably enough, I think, with anything _you_ can do. I
+don't say it because she's my niece--that's nothing to me: I might have
+had fifty nieces, and I wouldn't have brought one of them to this place
+if I hadn't found her to my taste. I don't say I wouldn't have done
+something else, but I wouldn't have put up with her presence. Kate's
+presence, by good fortune, I marked early; Kate's presence--unluckily
+for _you_--is everything I could possibly wish; Kate's presence is, in
+short, as fine as you know, and I've been keeping it for the comfort of
+my declining years. I've watched it long; I've been saving it up and
+letting it, as you say of investments, appreciate, and you may judge
+whether, now it has begun to pay so, I'm likely to consent to treat for
+it with any but a high bidder. I can do the best with her, and I've my
+idea of the best."
+
+"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. "I didn't ask
+you to come to hear what it isn't--I asked you to come to hear what it
+is."
+
+"Of course," Densher laughed, "it's very great indeed."
+
+His hostess went on as if his contribution to the subject were barely
+relevant. "I want to see her high, high up--high up and in the light."
+
+"Ah, you naturally want to marry her to a duke, and are eager to smooth
+away any hitch."
+
+She gave him so, on this, the mere effect of the drawn blind that it
+quite forced him, at first, into the sense, possibly just, of having
+affected her as flippant, perhaps even as low. He had been looked at
+so, in blighted moments of presumptuous youth, by big cold public men,
+but never, so far as he could recall, by any private lady. More than
+anything yet it gave him the measure of his companion's subtlety, and
+thereby of Kate's possible career. "Don't be _too_ impossible!"--he
+feared from his friend, for a moment, some such answer as that; and
+then felt, as she spoke otherwise, as if she were letting him off
+easily. "I want her to marry a great man." That was all; but, more and
+more, it was enough; and if it hadn't been her next words would have
+made it so. "And I think of her what I think. There you are."
+
+They sat for a little face to face upon it, and he was conscious of
+something deeper still, of something she wished him to understand if he
+only would. To that extent she did appeal--appealed to the intelligence
+she desired to show she believed him to possess. He was meanwhile, at
+all events, not the man wholly to fail of comprehension. "Of course I'm
+aware how little I can answer to any fond, proud dream. You've a
+view--a magnificent one; into which I perfectly enter. I thoroughly
+understand what I'm not, and I'm much obliged to you for not reminding
+me of it in any rougher way." She said nothing--she kept that up; it
+might even have been to let him go further, if he was capable of it, in
+the way of poorness of spirit. It was one of those cases in which a man
+couldn't show, if he showed at all, save for poor; unless indeed he
+preferred to show for asinine. It was the plain truth: he _was_--on
+Mrs. Lowder's basis, the only one in question--a very small quantity,
+and he did know, damnably, what made quantities large. He desired to be
+perfectly simple; yet in the midst of that effort a deeper apprehension
+throbbed. Aunt Maud clearly conveyed it, though he couldn't later on
+have said how. "You don't really matter, I believe, so much as you
+think, and I'm not going to make you a martyr by banishing you. Your
+performances with Kate in the Park are ridiculous so far as they're
+meant as consideration for me; and I had much rather see you
+myself--since you're, in your way, my dear young man, delightful--and
+arrange with you, count with you, as I easily, as I perfectly should.
+Do you suppose me so stupid as to quarrel with you if it's not really
+necessary? It won't--it would be too absurd!--_be_ necessary. I can
+bite your head off any day, any day I really open my mouth; and I'm
+dealing with you now, see--and successfully judge--without opening it.
+I do things handsomely all round--I place you in the presence of the
+plan with which, from the moment it's a case of taking you seriously,
+you're incompatible. Come then as near it as you like, walk all round
+it--don't be afraid you'll hurt it!--and live on with it before you."
+
+He afterwards felt that if she hadn't absolutely phrased all this it
+was because she so soon made him out as going with her far enough. He
+was so pleasantly affected by her asking no promise of him, her not
+proposing he should pay for her indulgence by his word of honour not to
+interfere, that he gave her a kind of general assurance of esteem.
+Immediately afterwards, then, he spoke of these things to Kate, and
+what then came back to him first of all was the way he had said to
+her--he mentioned it to the girl--very much as one of a pair of lovers
+says in a rupture by mutual consent: "I hope immensely, of course, that
+you'll always regard me as a friend." This had perhaps been going
+far--he submitted it all to Kate; but really there had been so much in
+it that it was to be looked at, as they might say, wholly in its own
+light. Other things than those we have presented had come up before the
+close of his scene with Aunt Maud, but this matter of her not treating
+him as a peril of the first order easily predominated. There was
+moreover plenty to talk about on the occasion of his subsequent passage
+with our young woman, it having been put to him abruptly, the night
+before, that he might give himself a lift and do his newspaper a
+service--so flatteringly was the case expressed--by going, for fifteen
+or twenty weeks, to America. The idea of a series of letters from the
+United States from the strictly social point of view had for some time
+been nursed in the inner sanctuary at whose door he sat, and the moment
+was now deemed happy for letting it loose. The imprisoned thought had,
+in a word, on the opening of the door, flown straight out into
+Densher's face, or perched at least on his shoulder, making him look up
+in surprise from his mere inky office-table. His account of the matter
+to Kate was that he couldn't refuse--not being in a position, as yet,
+to refuse anything; but that his being chosen for such an errand
+confounded his sense of proportion. He was definite as to his scarce
+knowing how to measure the honour, which struck him as equivocal; he
+had not quite supposed himself the man for the class of job. This
+confused consciousness, he intimated, he had promptly enough betrayed
+to his manager; with the effect, however, of seeing the question
+surprisingly clear up. What it came to was that the sort of twaddle
+that was not in his chords was, unexpectedly, just what they happened
+this time not to want. They wanted his letters, for queer reasons,
+about as good as he could let them come; he was to play his own little
+tune and not be afraid; that was the whole point.
+
+It would have been the whole, that is, had there not been a sharper one
+still in the circumstance that he was to start at once. His mission, as
+they called it at the office, would probably be over by the end of
+June, which was desirable; but to bring that about he must now not lose
+a week; his inquiries, he understood, were to cover the whole ground,
+and there were reasons of State--reasons operating at the seat of
+empire in Fleet Street--why the nail should be struck on the head.
+Densher made no secret to Kate of his having asked for a day to decide;
+and his account of that matter was that he felt he owed it to her to
+speak to her first. She assured him on this that nothing so much as
+that scruple had yet shown her how they were bound together; she was
+clearly proud of his letting a thing of such importance depend on her;
+but she was clearer still as to his instant duty. She rejoiced in his
+prospect and urged him to his task; she should miss him intensely--of
+course she should miss him; but she made so little of it that she spoke
+with jubilation of what he would see and would do. She made so much of
+this last quantity that he laughed at her innocence, though also with
+scarce the heart to give her the real size of his drop in the daily
+bucket. He was struck at the same time with her happy grasp of what had
+really occurred in Fleet Street--all the more that it was his own final
+reading. He was to pull the subject up--that was just what they wanted;
+and it would take more than all the United States together, visit them
+each as he might, to let _him_ down. It was just because he didn't nose
+about and wasn't the usual gossipmonger that they had picked him out;
+it was a branch of their correspondence with which they evidently
+wished a new tone associated, such a tone as, from now on, it would
+have always to take from his example.
+
+"How you ought indeed, when you understand so well, to be a
+journalist's wife!" Densher exclaimed in admiration, even while she
+struck him as fairly hurrying him off.
+
+But she was almost impatient of the praise. "What do you expect one
+_not_ to understand when one cares for you?"
+
+"Ah then, I'll put it otherwise and say 'How much you care for me!'"
+
+"Yes," she assented; "it fairly redeems my stupidity. I _shall,_ with a
+chance to show it," she added, "have some imagination for you."
+
+She spoke of the future this time as so little contingent, that he felt
+a queerness of conscience in making her the report that he presently
+arrived at on what had passed for him with the real arbiter of their
+destiny. The way for that had been blocked a little by his news from
+Fleet Street; but in the crucible of their happy discussion this
+element soon melted into the other, and in the mixture that ensued the
+parts were not to be distinguished. The young man moreover, before
+taking his leave, was to see why Kate had just spoken of the future as
+if they now really possessed it, and was to come to the vision by a
+devious way that deepened the final cheer. Their faces were turned to
+the illumined quarter as soon as he had answered her question in
+respect to the appearance of their being able to play a waiting game
+with success. It was for the possibility of that appearance that she
+had, a few days before, so earnestly pressed him to see her aunt; and
+if after his hour with that lady it had not struck Densher that he had
+seen her to the happiest purpose the poor facts flushed with a better
+meaning as Kate, one by one, took them up.
+
+"If she consents to your coming, why isn't that everything?"
+
+"It _is_ everything; everything _she_ thinks it. It's the
+probability--I mean as Mrs. Lowder measures probability--that I may be
+prevented from becoming a complication for her by some arrangement,
+_any_ arrangement, through which you shall see me often and easily.
+She's sure of my want of money, and that gives her time. She believes
+in my having a certain amount of delicacy, in my wishing to better my
+state before I put the pistol to your head in respect to sharing it.
+The time that will take figures for her as the time that will help her
+if she doesn't spoil her chance by treating me badly. She doesn't at
+all wish moreover," Densher went on, "to treat me badly, for I believe,
+upon my honour, funny as it may sound to you, that she personally
+rather likes me, and that if you weren't in question I might almost
+become her pet young man. She doesn't disparage intellect and
+culture--quite the contrary; she wants them to adorn her board and be
+named in her programme; and I'm sure it has sometimes cost her a real
+pang that I should be so desirable, at once, and so impossible." He
+paused a moment, and his companion then saw that a strange smile was in
+his face--a smile as strange even as the adjunct, in her own, of this
+informing vision. "I quite suspect her of believing that, if the truth
+were known, she likes me literally better than--deep down--you yourself
+do: wherefore she does me the honour to think that I may be safely left
+to kill my own cause. There, as I say, comes in her margin. I'm not the
+sort of stuff of romance that wears, that washes, that survives use,
+that resists familiarity. Once in any degree admit that, and your pride
+and prejudice will take care of the rest! the pride fed full,
+meanwhile, by the system she means to practise with you, and the
+prejudice excited by the comparison she'll enable you to make, from
+which I shall come off badly. She likes me, but she'll never like me so
+much as when she succeeded a little better in making me look wretched.
+For then _you'll_ like me less."
+
+Kate showed for this evocation a due interest, but no alarm; and it was
+a little as if to pay his tender cynicism back in kind that she after
+an instant replied: "I see, I see; what an immense affair she must
+think me! One was aware, but you deepen the impression."
+
+"I think you'll make no mistake," said Densher, "in letting it go as
+deep as it will."
+
+He had given her indeed, she made no scruple of showing, plenty to
+consider. "Her facing the music, her making you boldly as welcome as
+you say--that's an awfully big theory, you know, and worthy of all the
+other big things that, in one's acquaintance with people, give her a
+place so apart."
+
+"Oh, she's grand," the young man conceded; "she's on the scale,
+altogether, of the car of Juggernaut which was a kind of image that
+came to me yesterday while I waited for her at Lancaster Gate. The
+things in your drawing-room there were like the forms of the strange
+idols, the mystic excrescences, with which one may suppose the front of
+the car to bristle."
+
+"Yes, aren't they?" the girl returned; and they had, over all that
+aspect of their wonderful lady, one of those deep and free interchanges
+that made everything but confidence a false note for them. There were
+complications, there were questions; but they were so much more
+together than they were anything else. Kate uttered for a while no word
+of refutation of Aunt Maud's "big" diplomacy, and they left it there,
+as they would have left any other fine product, for a monument to her
+powers. But, Densher related further, he had had in other respects too
+the car of Juggernaut to face; he omitted nothing from his account of
+his visit, least of all the way Aunt Maud had frankly at last--though
+indeed only under artful pressure--fallen foul of his very type, his
+want of the right marks, his foreign accidents, his queer antecedents.
+She had told him he was but half a Briton, which, he granted Kate,
+would have been dreadful if he hadn't so let himself in for it.
+
+"I was really curious, you see," he explained, "to find out from her
+what sort of queer creature, what sort of social anomaly, in the light
+of such conventions as hers, such an education as mine makes one pass
+for."
+
+Kate said nothing for a little; but then, "Why should you care?" she
+asked.
+
+"Oh," he laughed, "I like her so much; and then, for a man of my trade,
+her views, her spirit, are essentially a thing to get hold of; they
+belong to the great public mind that we meet at every turn and that we
+must keep setting up 'codes' with. Besides," he added, "I want to
+please her personally."
+
+"Ah, yes, we must please her personally!" his companion echoed; and the
+words may represent all their definite recognition, at the time, of
+Densher's politic gain. They had in fact between this and his start for
+New York many matters to handle, and the question he now touched upon
+came up for Kate above all. She looked at him as if he had really told
+her aunt more of his immediate personal story than he had ever told
+herself. That, if it were so, was an accident, and it put him, for half
+an hour, on as much of the picture of his early years abroad, his
+migratory parents, his Swiss schools, his German university, as she had
+easy attention for. A man, he intimated, a man of their world, would
+have spotted him straight as to many of these points; a man of their
+world, so far as they had a world, would have been through the English
+mill. But it was none the less charming to make his confession to a
+woman; women had, in fact, for such differences, so much more
+imagination. Kate showed at present all his case could require; when
+she had had it from beginning to end she declared that she now made out
+more than ever yet of what she loved him for. She had herself, as a
+child, lived with some continuity in the world across the Channel,
+coming home again still a child; and had participated after that, in
+her teens, in her mother's brief but repeated retreats to Dresden, to
+Florence, to Biarritz, weak and expensive attempts at economy from
+which there stuck to her--though in general coldly expressed, through
+the instinctive avoidance of cheap raptures--the religion of foreign
+things. When it was revealed to her how many more foreign things were
+in Merton Densher than he had hitherto taken the trouble to catalogue,
+she almost faced him as if he were a map of the continent or a handsome
+present of a delightful new "Murray." He hadn't meant to swagger, he
+had rather meant to plead, though with Mrs. Lowder he had meant also a
+little to explain. His father had been, in strange countries, in twenty
+settlements of the English, British chaplain, resident or occasional,
+and had had for years the unusual luck of never wanting a billet. His
+career abroad had therefore been unbroken, and, as his stipend had
+never been great, he had educated his children at the smallest cost, in
+the schools nearest; which was also a saving of railway fares.
+Densher's mother, it further appeared, had practised on her side a
+distinguished industry, to the success of which--so far as success ever
+crowned it--this period of exile had much contributed: she copied,
+patient lady, famous pictures in great museums, having begun with a
+happy natural gift and taking in betimes the scale of her opportunity.
+Copyists abroad of course swarmed, but Mrs. Densher had had a sense and
+a hand of her own, had arrived at a perfection that persuaded, that
+even deceived, and that made the disposal of her work blissfully usual.
+Her son, who had lost her, held her image sacred, and the effect of his
+telling Kate all about her, as well as about other matters until then
+mixed and dim, was to render his history rich, his sources full, his
+outline anything but common. He had come round, he had come back, he
+insisted abundantly, to being a Briton: his Cambridge years, his happy
+connection, as it had proved, with his father's college, amply
+certified to that, to say nothing of his subsequent plunge into London,
+which filled up the measure. But brave enough though his descent to
+English earth, he had passed, by the way, through zones of air that had
+left their ruffle on his wings, had been exposed to initiations
+ineffaceable. Something had happened to him that could never be undone.
+
+When Kate Croy said to him as much he besought her not to insist,
+declaring that this indeed was what was too much the matter with him,
+that he had been but too probably spoiled for native, for insular use.
+On which, not unnaturally, she insisted the more, assuring him, without
+mitigation, that if he was complicated and brilliant she wouldn't for
+the world have had him any thing less; so that he was reduced in the
+end to accusing her of putting the dreadful truth to him in the hollow
+guise of flattery. She was making out how abnormal he was in order that
+she might eventually find him impossible; and, as she could fully make
+it out but with his aid, she had to bribe him by feigned delight to
+help her. If her last word for him, in the connection, was that the way
+he saw himself was just a precious proof the more of his having tasted
+of the tree and being thereby prepared to assist her to eat, this gives
+the happy tone of their whole talk, the measure of the flight of time
+in the near presence of his settled departure. Kate showed, however,
+that she was to be more literally taken when she spoke of the relief
+Aunt Maud would draw from the prospect of his absence.
+
+"Yet one can scarcely see why," he replied, "when she fears me so
+little."
+
+His friend weighed his objection. "Your idea is that she likes you so
+much that she'll even go so far as to regret losing you?"
+
+Well, he saw it in their constant comprehensive way. "Since what she
+builds on is the gradual process of your alienation, she may take the
+view that the process constantly requires me. Mustn't I be there to
+keep it going? It's in my exile that it may languish."
+
+He went on with that fantasy, but at this point Kate ceased to attend.
+He saw after a little that she had been following some thought of her
+own, and he had been feeling the growth of something determinant even
+through the extravagance of much of the pleasantry, the warm,
+transparent irony, into which their livelier intimacy kept plunging
+like a confident swimmer. Suddenly she said to him with extraordinary
+beauty: "I engage myself to you for ever."
+
+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; I give you every drop of my life."
+That was all, for the moment, but it was enough, and it was almost as
+quiet as if it were nothing. They were in the open air, in an alley of
+the Gardens; the great space, which seemed to arch just then higher and
+spread wider for them, threw them back into deep concentration. They
+moved by a common instinct to a spot, within sight, that struck them as
+fairly sequestered, and there, before their time together was spent,
+they had extorted from concentration every advance it could make them.
+They had exchanged vows and tokens, sealed their rich compact,
+solemnized, so far as breathed words and murmured sounds and lighted
+eyes and clasped hands could do it, their agreement to belong only, and
+to belong tremendously, to each other. They were to leave the place
+accordingly an affianced couple; but before they left it other things
+still had passed. Densher had declared his horror of bringing to a
+premature end her happy relation with her aunt; and they had worked
+round together to a high level of wisdom and patience. Kate's free
+profession was that she wished not to deprive _him_ of Mrs. Lowder's
+countenance, which, in the long run, she was convinced he would
+continue to enjoy; and as, by a blessed turn, Aunt Maud had demanded of
+him no promise that would tie his hands, they should be able to
+cultivate their destiny in their own way and yet remain loyal. One
+difficulty alone stood out, which Densher named.
+
+"Of course it will never do--we must remember that--from the moment you
+allow her to found hopes of you for any one else in particular. So long
+as her view is content to remain as general as at present appears, I
+don't see that we deceive her. At a given moment, you see, she must be
+undeceived: the only thing therefore is to be ready for the moment and
+to face it. Only, after all, in that case," the young man observed,
+"one doesn't quite make out what we shall have got from her."
+
+"What she'll have got from _us?"_ Kate inquired with a smile. "What
+she'll have got from us," the girl went on, "is her own affair--it's
+for _her_ to measure. I asked her for nothing," she added; "I never put
+myself upon her. She must take her risks, and she surely understands
+them. What we shall have got from her is what we've already spoken of,"
+Kate further explained; "it's that we shall have gained time. And so,
+for that matter, will she."
+
+Densher gazed a little at all this clearness; his gaze was not at the
+present hour into romantic obscurity. "Yes; no doubt, in our particular
+situation, time's everything. And then there's the joy of it."
+
+She hesitated. "Of our secret?"
+
+"Not so much perhaps of our secret in itself, but of what's represented
+and, as we must somehow feel, protected and made deeper and closer by
+it." And his fine face, relaxed into happiness, covered her with all
+his meaning. "Our being as we are."
+
+It was as if for a moment she let the meaning sink into her. "So gone?"
+
+"So gone. So extremely gone. However," he smiled, "we shall go a good
+deal further." Her answer to which was only the softness of her
+silence--a silence that looked out for them both at the far reach of
+their prospect. This was immense, and they thus took final possession
+of it. They were practically united and they were splendidly strong;
+but there were other things--things they were precisely strong enough
+to be able successfully to count with and safely to allow for; in
+consequence of which they would, for the present, subject to some
+better reason, keep their understanding to themselves. It was not
+indeed, however, till after one more observation of Densher's that they
+felt the question completely straightened out. "The only thing of
+course is that she may any day absolutely put it to you."
+
+Kate considered. "Ask me where, on my honour, we are? She may,
+naturally; but I doubt if in fact she will. While you're away she'll
+make the most of it. She'll leave me alone."
+
+"But there'll be my letters."
+
+The girl faced his letters. "Very, very many?"
+
+"Very, very, very many--more than ever; and you know what that is! And
+then," Densher added, "there'll be yours."
+
+"Oh, I shan't leave mine on the hall-table. I shall post them myself."
+
+He looked at her a moment. "Do you think then I had best address you
+elsewhere?" After which, before she could quite answer, he added with
+some emphasis: "I'd rather not, you know. It's straighter."
+
+She might again have just waited. "Of course it's straighter. Don't be
+afraid I shan't be straight. Address me," she continued, "where you
+like. I shall be proud enough of its being known you write to me."
+
+He turned it over for the last clearness. "Even at the risk of its
+really bringing down the inquisition?"
+
+Well, the last clearness now filled her. "I'm not afraid of the
+inquisition. If she asks if there's anything definite between us, I
+know perfectly what I shall say."
+
+"That I _am,_ of course, 'gone' for you?"
+
+"That I love you as I shall never in my life love any one else, and
+that she can make what she likes of that." She said it out so
+splendidly that it was like a new profession of faith, the fulness of a
+tide breaking through; and the effect of that, in turn, was to make her
+companion meet her with such eyes that she had time again before he
+could otherwise speak. "Besides, she's just as likely to ask _you."_
+
+"Not while I'm away."
+
+"Then when you come back."
+
+"Well then," said Densher, "we shall have had our particular joy. But
+what I feel is," he candidly added, "that, by an idea of her own, her
+superior policy, she _won't_ ask me. She'll let me off. I shan't have
+to lie to her."
+
+"It will be left all to me?" asked Kate.
+
+"All to you!" he tenderly laughed.
+
+But it was, oddly, the very next moment as if he had perhaps been a
+shade too candid. His discrimination seemed to mark a possible, a
+natural reality, a reality not wholly disallowed by the account the
+girl had just given of her own intention. There _was_ a difference in
+the air--even if none other than the supposedly usual difference in
+truth between man and woman; and it was almost as if the sense of this
+provoked her. She seemed to cast about an instant, and then she went
+back a little resentfully to something she had suffered to pass a
+minute before. She appeared to take up rather more seriously than she
+need the joke about her freedom to deceive. Yet she did this too in a
+beautiful way. "Men are too stupid--even you. You didn't understand
+just now why, if I post my letters myself, it won't be for any thing so
+vulgar as to hide them."
+
+"Oh, you said--for the pleasure."
+
+"Yes; but you didn't, you don't understand what the pleasure may be.
+There are refinements----!" she more patiently dropped. "I mean of
+consciousness, of sensation, of appreciation," she went on. "No," she
+sadly insisted--_"men_ don't know. They know, in such matters, almost
+nothing but what women show them."
+
+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!"
+
+
+
+
+BOOK THIRD
+
+V
+
+
+The two ladies who, in advance of the Swiss season, had been warned
+that their design was unconsidered, that the passes would not be clear,
+nor the air mild, nor the inns open--the two ladies who,
+characteristically, had braved a good deal of possibly interested
+remonstrance were finding themselves, as their adventure turned out,
+wonderfully sustained. It was the judgment of the head-waiters and
+other functionaries on the Italian lakes that approved itself now as
+interested; they themselves had been conscious of impatiences, of
+bolder dreams--at least the younger had; so that one of the things they
+made out together--making out as they did an endless variety--was that
+in those operatic palaces of the Villa d'Este, of Cadenabbia, of
+Pallanza and Stresa, lone women, however reinforced by a
+travelling-library of instructive volumes, were apt to be beguiled and
+undone. Their flights of fancy moreover had been modest; they had for
+instance risked nothing vital in hoping to make their way by the
+Brünig. They were making it in fact happily enough as we meet them, and
+were only wishing that, for the wondrous beauty of the early
+high-climbing spring, it might have been longer and the places to pause
+and rest more numerous.
+
+Such at least had been the intimated attitude of Mrs. Stringham, the
+elder of the companions, who had her own view of the impatiences of the
+younger, to which, however, she offered an opposition but of the most
+circuitous. She moved, the admirable Mrs. Stringham, in a fine cloud of
+observation and suspicion; she was in the position, as she believed, of
+knowing much more about Milly Theale than Milly herself knew, and yet
+of having to darken her knowledge as well as make it active. The woman
+in the world least formed by nature, as she was quite aware, for
+duplicities and labyrinths, she found herself dedicated to personal
+subtlety by a new set of circumstances, above all by a new personal
+relation; had now in fact to recognise that an education in the
+occult--she could scarce say what to call it--had begun for her the day
+she left New York with Mildred. She had come on from Boston for that
+purpose; had seen little of the girl--or rather had seen her but
+briefly, for Mrs. Stringham, when she saw anything at all, saw much,
+saw everything--before accepting her proposal; and had accordingly
+placed herself, by her act, in a boat that she more and more estimated
+as, humanly speaking, of the biggest, though likewise, no doubt, in
+many ways, by reason of its size, of the safest. In Boston, the winter
+before, the young lady in whom we are interested had, on the spot,
+deeply, yet almost tacitly, appealed to her, dropped into her mind the
+shy conceit of some assistance, some devotion to render. Mrs.
+Stringham's little life had often been visited by shy conceits--secret
+dreams that had fluttered their hour between its narrow walls without,
+for any great part, so much as mustering courage to look out of its
+rather dim windows. But this imagination--the fancy of a possible link
+with the remarkable young thing from New York--_had_ mustered courage:
+had perched, on the instant, at the clearest look-out it could find,
+and might be said to have remained there till, only a few months later,
+it had caught, in surprise and joy, the unmistakable flash of a signal.
+
+Milly Theale had Boston friends, such as they were, and of recent
+making; and it was understood that her visit to them--a visit that was
+not to be meagre--had been undertaken, after a series of bereavements,
+in the interest of the particular peace that New York could not give.
+It was recognised, liberally enough, that there were many
+things--perhaps even too many--New York _could_ give; but this was felt
+to make no difference in the constant fact that what you had most to
+do, under the discipline of life, or of death, was really to feel your
+situation as grave. Boston could help you to that as nothing else
+could, and it had extended to Milly, by every presumption, some such
+measure of assistance. Mrs. Stringham was never to forget--for the
+moment had not faded, nor the infinitely fine vibration it set up in
+any degree ceased--her own first sight of the striking apparition, then
+unheralded and unexplained: the slim, constantly pale, delicately
+haggard, anomalously, agreeably angular young person, of not more than
+two-and-twenty in spite of her marks, whose hair was some how
+exceptionally red even for the real thing, which it innocently
+confessed to being, and whose clothes were remarkably black even for
+robes of mourning, which was the meaning they expressed. It was New
+York mourning, it was New York hair, it was a New York history,
+confused as yet, but multitudinous, of the loss of parents, brothers,
+sisters, almost every human appendage, all on a scale and with a sweep
+that had required the greater stage; it was a New York legend of
+affecting, of romantic isolation, and, beyond everything, it was by
+most accounts, in respect to the mass of money so piled on the girl's
+back, a set of New York possibilities. She was alone, she was stricken,
+she was rich, and, in particular, she was strange--a combination in
+itself of a nature to engage Mrs. Stringham's attention. But it was the
+strangeness that most determined our good lady's sympathy, convinced as
+she was that it was much greater than any one else--any one but the
+sole Susan Stringham--supposed. Susan privately settled it that Boston
+was not in the least seeing her, was only occupied with her seeing
+Boston, and that any assumed affinity between the two characters was
+delusive and vain. She was seeing her, and she had quite the deepest
+moment of her life in now obeying the instinct to conceal the vision.
+She couldn't explain it--no one would understand. They would say clever
+Boston things--Mrs. Stringham was from Burlington, Vermont, which she
+boldly upheld as the real heart of New England, Boston being "too far
+south"--but they would only darken counsel.
+
+There could be no better proof, than this quick intellectual split, of
+the impression made on our friend, who shone, herself, she was well
+aware, with but the reflected light of the admirable city. She too had
+had her discipline, but it had not made her striking; it had been
+prosaically usual, though doubtless a decent dose; and had only made
+her usual to match it--usual, that is, as Boston went. She had lost
+first her husband, and then her mother, with whom, on her husband's
+death, she had lived again; so that now, childless, she was but more
+sharply single than before. But she sat rather coldly light, having, as
+she called it, enough to live on--so far, that is, as she lived by
+bread alone: how little indeed she was regularly content with that diet
+appeared from the name she had made--Susan Shepherd Stringham--as a
+contributor to the best magazines. She wrote short stories, and she
+fondly believed she had her "note," the art of showing New England
+without showing it wholly in the kitchen. She had not herself been
+brought up in the kitchen; she knew others who had not; and to speak
+for them had thus become with her a literary mission. To _be_ in truth
+literary had ever been her dearest thought, the thought that kept her
+bright little nippers perpetually in position. There were masters,
+models, celebrities, mainly foreign, whom she finely accounted so and
+in whose light she ingeniously laboured; there were others whom,
+however chattered about, she ranked with the inane, for she was full of
+discrimination; but all categories failed her--they ceased at least to
+signify--as soon as she found herself in presence of the real thing,
+the romantic life itself. That was what she saw in Mildred--what
+positively made her hand a while tremble too much for the pen. She had
+had, it seemed to her, a revelation--such as even New England refined
+and grammatical couldn't give; and, all made up as she was of small
+neat memories and ingenuities, little industries and ambitions, mixed
+with something moral, personal, that was still more intensely
+responsive, she felt her new friend would have done her an ill turn if
+their friendship shouldn't develop, and yet that nothing would be left
+of anything else if it should. It was for the surrender of everything
+else that she was, however, quite prepared, and while she went about
+her usual Boston business with her usual Boston probity she was really
+all the while holding herself. She wore her "handsome" felt hat, so
+Tyrolese, yet some how, though feathered from the eagle's wing, so
+truly domestic, with the same straightness and security; she attached
+her fur boa with the same honest precautions; she preserved her balance
+on the ice-slopes with the same practised skill; she opened, each
+evening, her "Transcript" with the same interfusion of suspense and
+resignation; she attended her almost daily concert with the same
+expenditure of patience and the same economy of passion; she flitted in
+and out of the Public Library with the air of conscientiously returning
+or bravely carrying off in her pocket the key of knowledge itself; and
+finally--it was what she most did--she watched the thin trickle of a
+fictive "love-interest" through that somewhat serpentine channel, in
+the magazines, which she mainly managed to keep clear for it. But the
+real thing, all the while, was elsewhere; the real thing had gone back
+to New York, leaving behind it the two unsolved questions, quite
+distinct, of why it _was_ real, and whether she should ever be so near
+it again.
+
+For the figure to which these questions attached themselves she had
+found a convenient description--she thought of it for herself, always,
+as that of a girl with a background. The great reality was in the fact
+that, very soon, after but two or three meetings, the girl with the
+background, the girl with the crown of old gold and the mourning that
+was not as the mourning of Boston, but at once more rebellious in its
+gloom and more frivolous in its frills, had told her she had never seen
+any one like her. They had met thus as opposed curiosities, and that
+simple remark of Milly's--if simple it was--became the most important
+thing that had ever happened to her; it deprived the love-interest, for
+the time, of actuality and even of pertinence; it moved her first, in
+short, in a high degree, to gratitude, and then to no small compassion.
+Yet in respect to this relation at least it was what did prove the key
+of knowledge; it lighted up as nothing else could do the poor young
+woman's history. That the potential heiress of all the ages should
+never have seen any one like a mere typical subscriber, after all, to
+the "Transcript" was a truth that--in especial as announced with
+modesty, with humility, with regret--described a situation. It laid
+upon the elder woman, as to the void to be filled, a weight of
+responsibility; but in particular it led her to ask whom poor Mildred
+_had_ then seen, and what range of contacts it had taken to produce
+such queer surprises. That was really the inquiry that had ended by
+clearing the air: the key of knowledge was felt to click in the lock
+from the moment it flashed upon Mrs. Stringham that her friend had been
+starved for culture. Culture was what she herself represented for her,
+and it was living up to that principle that would surely prove the
+great business. She knew, the clever lady, what the principle itself
+represented, and the limits of her own store; and a certain alarm would
+have grown upon her if something else hadn't grown faster.
+
+This was, fortunately for her--and we give it in her own words--the
+sense of a harrowing pathos. That, primarily, was what appealed to her,
+what seemed to open the door of romance for her still wider than any,
+than a still more reckless, connection with the "picture-papers." For
+such was essentially the point: it was rich, romantic, abysmal, to
+have, as was evident, thousands and thousands a year, to have youth and
+intelligence and if not beauty, at least, in equal measure, a high,
+dim, charming, ambiguous oddity, which was even better, and then on top
+of all to enjoy boundless freedom, the freedom of the wind in the
+desert--it was unspeakably touching to be so equipped and yet to have
+been reduced by fortune to little humble-minded mistakes.
+
+It brought our friend's imagination back again to New York, where
+aberrations were so possible in the intellectual sphere, and it in fact
+caused a visit she presently paid there to overflow with interest. As
+Milly had beautifully invited her, so she would hold out if she could
+against the strain of so much confidence in her mind; and the
+remarkable thing was that even at the end of three weeks she _had_ held
+out. But by this time her mind had grown comparatively bold and free;
+it was dealing with new quantities, a different proportion
+altogether--and that had made for refreshment: she had accordingly gone
+home in convenient possession of her subject. New York was vast, New
+York was startling, with strange histories, with wild cosmopolite
+backward generations that accounted for anything; and to have got
+nearer the luxuriant tribe of which the rare creature was the final
+flower, the immense, extravagant, unregulated cluster, with free-living
+ancestors, handsome dead cousins, lurid uncles, beautiful vanished
+aunts, persons all busts and curls, preserved, though so exposed, in
+the marble of famous French chisels--all this, to say nothing of the
+effect of closer growths of the stem, was to have had one's small
+world-space both crowded and enlarged. Our couple had at all events
+effected an exchange; the elder friend had been as consciously
+intellectual as possible, and the younger, abounding in personal
+revelation, had been as unconsciously distinguished. This was
+poetry--it was also history--Mrs. Stringham thought, to a finer tune
+even than Maeterlink and Pater, than Marbot and Gregorovius. She
+appointed occasions for the reading of these authors with her hostess,
+rather perhaps than actually achieved great spans; but what they
+managed and what they missed speedily sank for her into the dim depths
+of the merely relative, so quickly, so strongly had she clutched her
+central clue. All her scruples and hesitations, all her anxious
+enthusiasms, had reduced themselves to a single alarm--the fear that
+she really might act on her companion clumsily and coarsely. She was
+positively afraid of what she might do to her, and to avoid that, to
+avoid it with piety and passion, to do, rather, nothing at all, to
+leave her untouched because no touch one could apply, however light,
+however just, however earnest and anxious, would be half good enough,
+would be anything but an ugly smutch upon perfection--this now imposed
+itself as a consistent, an inspiring thought.
+
+Less than a month after the event that had so determined Mrs.
+Stringham's attitude--close upon the heels, that is, of her return from
+New York--she was reached by a proposal that brought up for her the
+kind of question her delicacy might have to contend with. Would she
+start for Europe with her young friend at the earliest possible date,
+and should she be willing to do so without making conditions? The
+inquiry was launched by wire; explanations, in sufficiency, were
+promised; extreme urgency was suggested, and a general surrender
+invited. It was to the honour of her sincerity that she made the
+surrender on the spot, though it was not perhaps altogether to that of
+her logic. She had wanted, very consciously, from the first, to give
+something up for her new acquaintance, but she had now no doubt that
+she was practically giving up all. What settled this was the fulness of
+a particular impression, the impression that had throughout more and
+more supported her and which she would have uttered so far as she might
+by saying that the charm of the creature was positively in the
+creature's greatness. She would have been content so to leave it;
+unless indeed she had said, more familiarly, that Mildred was the
+biggest impression of her life. That was at all events the biggest
+account of her, and none but a big, clearly, would do. Her situation,
+as such things were called, was on the grand scale; but it still was
+not that. It was her nature, once for all--a nature that reminded Mrs.
+Stringham of the term always used in the newspapers about the great new
+steamers, the inordinate number of "feet of water" they drew; so that
+if, in your little boat, you had chosen to hover and approach, you had
+but yourself to thank, when once motion was started, for the way the
+draught pulled you. Milly drew the feet of water, and odd though it
+might seem that a lonely girl, who was not robust and who hated sound
+and show, should stir the stream like a leviathan, her companion
+floated off with the sense of rocking violently at her side. More than
+prepared, however, for that excitement, Mrs. Stringham mainly failed of
+ease in respect to her own consistency. To attach herself for an
+indefinite time seemed a roundabout way of holding her hands off. If
+she wished to be sure of neither touching nor smutching, the straighter
+plan would doubtless have been not to keep her friend within reach.
+This in fact she fully recognised, and with it the degree to which she
+desired that the girl should lead her life, a life certain to be so
+much finer than that of anybody else. The difficulty, however, by good
+fortune, cleared away as soon as she had further recognised, as she was
+speedily able to do, that she, Susan Shepherd--the name with which
+Milly for the most part amused herself--was _not_ anybody else. She had
+renounced that character; she had now no life to lead; and she honestly
+believed that she was thus supremely equipped for leading Milly's own.
+No other person whatever, she was sure, had to an equal degree this
+qualification, and it was really to assert it that she fondly embarked.
+
+Many things, though not in many weeks, had come and gone since then,
+and one of the best of them, doubtless, had been the voyage itself, by
+the happy southern course, to the succession of Mediterranean ports,
+with the dazzled wind-up at Naples. Two or three others had preceded
+this; incidents, indeed rather lively marks, of their last fortnight at
+home, and one of which had determined on Mrs. Stringham's part a rush
+to New York, forty-eight breathless hours there, previous to her final
+rally. But the great sustained sea-light had drunk up the rest of the
+picture, so that for many days other questions and other possibilities
+sounded with as little effect as a trio of penny whistles might sound
+in a Wagner overture. It was the Wagner overture that practically
+prevailed, up through Italy, where Milly had already been, still
+further up and across the Alps, which were also partly known to Mrs.
+Stringham; only perhaps "taken" to a time not wholly congruous, hurried
+in fact on account of the girl's high restlessness. She had been
+expected, she had frankly promised, to be restless--that was partly why
+she was "great"--or was a consequence, at any rate, if not a cause; yet
+she had not perhaps altogether announced herself as straining so hard
+at the cord. It was familiar, it was beautiful to Mrs. Stringham that
+she had arrears to make up, the chances that had lapsed for her through
+the wanton ways of forefathers fond of Paris, but not of its higher
+sides, and fond almost of nothing else; but the vagueness, the
+openness, the eagerness without point and the interest without
+pause--all a part of the charm of her oddity as at first presented--had
+become more striking in proportion as they triumphed over movement and
+change. She had arts and idiosyncrasies of which no great account could
+have been given, but which were a daily grace if you lived with them;
+such as the art of being almost tragically impatient and yet making it
+as light as air; of being inexplicably sad and yet making it as clear
+as noon; of being unmistakably gay, and yet making it as soft as dusk.
+Mrs. Stringham by this time understood everything, was more than ever
+confirmed in wonder and admiration, in her view that it was life enough
+simply to feel her companion's feelings; but there were special keys
+she had not yet added to her bunch, impressions that, of a sudden, were
+apt to affect her as new.
+
+This particular day on the great Swiss road had been, for some reason,
+full of them, and they referred themselves, provisionally, to some
+deeper depth than she had touched--though into two or three such
+depths, it must be added, she had peeped long enough to find herself
+suddenly draw back. It was not Milly's unpacified state, in short, that
+now troubled her--though certainly, as Europe was the great American
+sedative, the failure was to some extent to be noted: it was the
+suspected presence of something behind it--which, however, could
+scarcely have taken its place there since their departure. What any
+fresh motive of unrest could suddenly have sprung from was, in short,
+not to be divined. It was but half an explanation to say that
+excitement, for each of them, had naturally dropped, and that what they
+had left behind, or tried to--the great serious facts of life, as Mrs.
+Stringham liked to call them--was once more coming into sight as
+objects loom through smoke when smoke begins to clear; for these were
+general appearances from which the girl's own aspect, her really larger
+vagueness, seemed rather to disconnect itself. The nearest approach to
+a personal anxiety indulged in as yet by the elder lady was on her
+taking occasion to wonder if what she had more than anything else got
+hold of mightn't be one of the finer, one of the finest, one of the
+rarest--as she called it so that she might call it nothing worse--cases
+of American intensity. She had just had a moment of alarm--asked
+herself if her young friend were merely going to treat her to some
+complicated drama of nerves. At the end of a week, however, with their
+further progress, her young friend had effectively answered the
+question and given her the impression, indistinct indeed as yet, of
+something that had a reality compared with which the nervous
+explanation would have been coarse. Mrs. Stringham found herself from
+that hour, in other words, in presence of an explanation that remained
+a muffled and intangible form, but that, assuredly, should it take on
+sharpness, would explain everything and more than everything, would
+become instantly the light in which Milly was to be read.
+
+Such a matter as this may at all events speak of the style in which our
+young woman could affect those who were near her, may testify to the
+sort of interest she could inspire. She worked--and seemingly quite
+without design--upon the sympathy, the curiosity, the fancy of her
+associates, and we shall really ourselves scarce otherwise come closer
+to her than by feeling their impression and sharing, if need be, their
+confusion. She reduced them, Mrs. Stringham would have said, reduced
+them to a consenting bewilderment; which was precisely, for that good
+lady, on a last analysis, what was most in harmony with her greatness.
+She exceeded, escaped measure, was surprising only because _they_ were
+so far from great. Thus it was that on this wondrous day on the Brünig
+the spell of watching her had grown more than ever irresistible; a
+proof of what--or of a part of what--Mrs. Stringham had, with all the
+rest, been reduced to. She had almost the sense of tracking her young
+friend as if at a given moment to pounce. She knew she shouldn't
+pounce, she hadn't come out to pounce; yet she felt her attention
+secretive, all the same, and her observation scientific. She struck
+herself as hovering like a spy, applying tests, laying traps,
+concealing signs. This would last, however, only till she should fairly
+know what was the matter; and to watch was, after all, meanwhile, a way
+of clinging to the girl, not less than an occupation, a satisfaction in
+itself. The pleasure of watching, moreover, if a reason were needed,
+came from a sense of her beauty. Her beauty hadn't at all originally
+seemed a part of the situation, and Mrs. Stringham had, even in the
+first flush of friendship, not named it, grossly, to any one; having
+seen early that, for stupid people--and who, she sometimes secretly
+asked herself, wasn't stupid?--it would take a great deal of
+explaining. She had learned not to mention it till it was mentioned
+first--which occasionally happened, but not too often; and then she was
+there in force. Then she both warmed to the perception that met her own
+perception, and disputed it, suspiciously, as to special items; while,
+in general, she had learned to refine even to the point of herself
+employing the word that most people employed. She employed it to
+pretend that she was also stupid and so have done with the matter;
+spoke of her friend as plain, as ugly even, in a case of especially
+dense insistence; but as, in appearance, so "awfully full of things."
+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.
+
+Mrs. Stringham was now on the ground of thrilled recognitions, small
+sharp echoes of a past which she kept in a well-thumbed case, but
+which, on pressure of a spring and exposure to the air, still showed
+itself ticking as hard as an honest old watch. The embalmed "Europe" of
+her younger time had partly stood for three years of Switzerland, a
+term of continuous school at Vevey, with rewards of merit in the form
+of silver medals tied by blue ribbons and mild mountain-passes attacked
+with alpenstocks. It was the good girls who, in the holidays, were
+taken highest, and our friend could now judge, from what she supposed
+her familiarity with the minor peaks, that she had been one of the
+best. These reminiscences, sacred to-day because prepared in the hushed
+chambers of the past, had been part of the general train laid for the
+pair of sisters, daughters early fatherless, by their brave Vermont
+mother, who struck her at present as having apparently, almost like
+Columbus, worked out, all unassisted, a conception of the other side of
+the globe. She had focussed Vevey, by the light of nature, and with
+extraordinary completeness, at Burlington; after which she had
+embarked, sailed, landed, explored and, above all, made good her
+presence. She had given her daughters the five years in Switzerland and
+Germany that were to leave them ever afterwards a standard of
+comparison for all cycles of Cathay, and to stamp the younger in
+especial--Susan was the younger--with a character that, as Mrs.
+Stringham had often had occasion, through life, to say to herself, made
+all the difference. It made all the difference for Mrs. Stringham, over
+and over again and in the most remote connections, that, thanks to her
+parent's lonely, thrifty, hardy faith, she was a woman of the world.
+There were plenty of women who were all sorts of things that she
+wasn't, but who, on the other hand, were not that, and who didn't know
+_she_ was (which she liked--it relegated them still further) and didn't
+know, either, how it enabled her to judge them. She had never seen
+herself so much in this light as during the actual phase of her
+associated, if slightly undirected, pilgrimage; and the consciousness
+gave perhaps to her plea for a pause more intensity than she knew. The
+irrecoverable days had come back to her from far off; they were part of
+the sense of the cool upper air and of everything else that hung like
+an indestructible scent to the torn garment of youth--the taste of
+honey and the luxury of milk, the sound of cattle-bells and the rush of
+streams, the fragrance of trodden balms and the dizziness of deep
+gorges.
+
+Milly clearly felt these things too, but they affected her companion at
+moments--that was quite the way Mrs. Stringham would have expressed
+it--as the princess in a conventional tragedy might have affected the
+confidant if a personal emotion had ever been permitted to the latter.
+That a princess could only be a princess was a truth with which,
+essentially, a confidant, however responsive, had to live. Mrs.
+Stringham was a woman of the world, but Milly Theale was a princess,
+the only one she had yet had to deal with, and this in its way, too,
+made all the difference. It was a perfectly definite doom for the
+wearer--it was for every one else a perfectly palpable quality. It
+might have been, possibly, with its involved loneliness and other
+mysteries, the weight under which she fancied her companion's admirable
+head occasionally, and ever so submissively, bowed. Milly had quite
+assented at luncheon to their staying over, and had left her to look at
+rooms, settle questions, arrange about their keeping on their carriage
+and horses; cares that had now moreover fallen to Mrs. Stringham as a
+matter of course and that yet for some reason, on this occasion
+particularly, brought home to her--all agreeably, richly, almost
+grandly--what it was to live with the great. Her young friend had, in a
+sublime degree, a sense closed to the general question of difficulty,
+which she got rid of, furthermore, not in the least as one had seen
+many charming persons do, by merely passing it on to others. She kept
+it completely at a distance: it never entered the circle; the most
+plaintive confidant couldn't have dragged it in; and to tread the path
+of a confidant was accordingly to live exempt. Service was in other
+words so easy to render that the whole thing was like court life
+without the hardships. It came back of course to the question of money,
+and our observant lady had by this time repeatedly reflected that if
+one were talking of the "difference," it was just this, this
+incomparably and nothing else, that when all was said and done most
+made it. A less vulgarly, a less obviously purchasing or parading
+person she couldn't have imagined; but it was, all the same, the truth
+of truths that the girl couldn't get away from her wealth. She might
+leave her conscientious companion as freely alone with it as possible
+and never ask a question, scarce even tolerate a reference; but it was
+in the fine folds of the helplessly expensive little black frock that
+she drew over the grass as she now strolled vaguely off; it was in the
+curious and splendid coils of hair, "done" with no eye whatever to the
+_mode du jour,_ that peeped from under the corresponding indifference
+of her hat, the merely personal tradition that suggested a sort of
+noble inelegance; it lurked between the leaves of the uncut but
+antiquated Tauchnitz volume of which, before going out, she had
+mechanically possessed herself. 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. Stringham, though the
+bright afternoon was yet young, took, with precautions, the same
+direction, went to join her in case of her caring for a walk. But the
+purpose of joining her was in truth less distinct than that of a due
+regard for a possibly preferred detachment: so that, once more, the
+good lady proceeded with a quietness that made her slightly "underhand"
+even in her own eyes. She couldn't help that, however, and she didn't
+care, sure as she was that what she really wanted was not to overstep,
+but to stop in time. It was to be able to stop in time that she went
+softly, but she had on this occasion further to go than ever yet, for
+she followed in vain, and at last with some anxiety, the footpath she
+believed Milly to have taken. It wound up a hillside and into the
+higher Alpine meadows in which, all these last days, they had so often
+wanted, as they passed above or below, to stray; and then it obscured
+itself in a wood, but always going up, up, and with a small cluster of
+brown old high-perched chalets evidently for its goal. Mrs. Stringham
+reached in due course the chalets, and there received from a bewildered
+old woman, a very fearful person to behold, an indication that
+sufficiently guided her. The young lady had been seen not long before
+passing further on, over a crest and to a place where the way would
+drop again, as our unappeased inquirer found it, in fact, a quarter of
+an hour later, markedly and almost alarmingly to do. It led somewhere,
+yet apparently quite into space, for the great side of the mountain
+appeared, from where she pulled up, to fall away altogether, though
+probably but to some issue below and out of sight. Her uncertainty
+moreover was brief, for she next became aware of the presence on a
+fragment of rock, twenty yards off, of the Tauchnitz volume that the
+girl had brought out, and that therefore pointed to her shortly
+previous passage. She had rid herself of the book, which was an
+encumbrance, and meant of course to pick it up on her return; but as
+she hadn't yet picked it up what on earth had become of her? Mrs.
+Stringham, I hasten to add, was within a few moments to see; but it was
+quite an accident that she had not, before they were over, betrayed by
+her deeper agitation the fact of her own nearness.
+
+The whole place, with the descent of the path and as a sequel to a
+sharp turn that was masked by rocks and shrubs, appeared to fall
+precipitously and to become a "view" pure and simple, a view of great
+extent and beauty, but thrown forward and vertiginous. Milly, with the
+promise of it from just above, had gone straight down to it, not
+stopping till it was all before her; and here, on what struck her
+friend as the dizzy edge of it, she was seated at her ease. The path
+somehow took care of itself and its final business, but the girl's seat
+was a slab of rock at the end of a short promontory or excrescence that
+merely pointed off to the right into gulfs of air and that was so
+placed by good fortune, if not by the worst, as to be at last
+completely visible. For Mrs. Stringham stifled a cry on taking in what
+she believed to be the danger of such a perch for a mere maiden; her
+liability to slip, to slide, to leap, to be precipitated by a single
+false movement, by a turn of the head--how could one tell? into
+whatever was beneath. A thousand thoughts, for the minute, roared in
+the poor lady's ears, but without reaching, as happened, Milly's. It
+was a commotion that left our observer intensely still and holding her
+breath. What had first been offered her was the possibility of a latent
+intention--however wild the idea--in such a posture; of some betrayed
+accordance of Milly's caprice with a horrible hidden obsession. But
+since Mrs. Stringham stood as motionless as if a sound, a syllable,
+must have produced the start that would be fatal, so even the lapse of
+a few seconds had a partly reassuring effect. It gave her time to
+receive the impression which, when she some minutes later softly
+retraced her steps, was to be the sharpest she carried away. This was
+the impression that if the girl was deeply and recklessly meditating
+there, she was not meditating a jump; she was on the contrary, as she
+sat, much more in a state of uplifted and unlimited possession that had
+nothing to gain from violence. She was looking down on the kingdoms of
+the earth, and though indeed that of itself might well go to the brain,
+it wouldn't be with a view of renouncing them. Was she choosing among
+them, or did she want them all? This question, before Mrs. Stringham
+had decided what to do, made others vain; in accordance with which she
+saw, or believed she did, that if it might be dangerous to call out, to
+sound in any way a surprise, it would probably be safe enough to
+withdraw as she had come. She watched a while longer, she held her
+breath, and she never knew afterwards what time had elapsed.
+
+Not many minutes probably, yet they had not seemed few, and they had
+given her so much to think of, not only while creeping home, but while
+waiting afterwards at the inn, that she was still busy with them when,
+late in the afternoon, Milly reappeared. She had stopped at the point
+of the path where the Tauchnitz lay, had taken it up and, with the
+pencil attached to her watch-guard, had scrawled a word--_à
+bientôt!_--across the cover; then, even under the girl's continued
+delay, had measured time without a return of alarm. For she now saw
+that the great thing she had brought away was precisely a conviction
+that the future was not to exist for her princess in the form of any
+sharp or simple release from the human predicament. It wouldn't be for
+her a question of a flying leap and thereby of a quick escape. It would
+be a question of taking full in the face the whole assault of life, to
+the general muster of which indeed her face might have been directly
+presented as she sat there on her rock. Mrs. Stringham was thus able to
+say to herself, even after another interval of some length, that if her
+young friend still continued absent it wouldn't be because--whatever
+the opportunity--she had cut short the thread. She wouldn't have
+committed suicide; she knew herself unmistakably reserved for some more
+complicated passage; this was the very vision in which she had, with no
+little awe, been discovered. The image that thus remained with the
+elder lady kept the character of revelation. During the breathless
+minutes of her watch she had seen her companion afresh; the latter's
+type, aspect, marks, her history, her state, her beauty, her mystery,
+all unconsciously betrayed themselves to the Alpine air, and all had
+been gathered in again to feed Mrs. Stringham's flame. They are things
+that will more distinctly appear for us, and they are meanwhile briefly
+represented by the enthusiasm that was stronger on our friend's part
+than any doubt. It was a consciousness she was scarce yet used to
+carrying, but she had as beneath her feet a mine of something precious.
+She seemed to herself to stand near the mouth, not yet quite cleared.
+The mine but needed working and would certainly yield a treasure. She
+was not thinking, either, of Milly's gold.
+
+
+VI
+
+The girl said nothing, when they met, about the words scrawled on the
+Tauchnitz, and Mrs. Stringham then noticed that she had not the book
+with her. She had left it lying and probably would never remember it at
+all. Her comrade's decision was therefore quickly made not to speak of
+having followed her; and within five minutes of her return, wonderfully
+enough, the preoccupation denoted by her forgetfulness further declared
+itself. "Should you think me quite abominable if I were to say that
+after all----?"
+
+Mrs. Stringham had already thought, with the first sound of the
+question, everything she was capable of thinking, and had immediately
+made such a sign that Milly's words gave place to visible relief at her
+assent. "You don't care for our stop here--you'd rather go straight on?
+We'll start then with the peep of to-morrow's dawn--or as early as you
+like; it's only rather late now to take the road again." And she smiled
+to show how she meant it for a joke that an instant onward rush was
+what the girl would have wished. "I bullied you into stopping," she
+added; "so it serves me right."
+
+Milly made in general the most of her good friend's jokes; but she
+humoured this one a little absently. "Oh yes, you do bully me." And it
+was thus arranged between them, with no discussion at all, that they
+would resume their journey in the morning. The younger tourist's
+interest in the detail of the matter--in spite of a declaration from
+the elder that she would consent to be dragged anywhere--appeared
+almost immediately afterwards quite to lose itself; she promised,
+however, to think till supper of where, with the world all before them,
+they might go--supper having been ordered for such time as permitted of
+lighted candles. It had been agreed between them that lighted candles
+at wayside inns, in strange countries, amid mountain scenery, gave the
+evening meal a peculiar poetry--such being the mild adventures, the
+refinements of impression, that they, as they would have said, went in
+for. It was now as if, before this repast, Milly had designed to "lie
+down"; but at the end of three minutes more she was not lying down, she
+was saying instead, abruptly, with a transition that was like a jump of
+four thousand miles: "What was it that, in New York, on the ninth, when
+you saw him alone, Dr. Finch said to you?"
+
+It was not till later that Mrs. Stringham fully knew why the question
+had startled her still more than its suddenness explained; though the
+effect of it even at the moment was almost to frighten her into a false
+answer. She had to think, to remember the occasion, the "ninth," in New
+York, the time she had seen Dr. Finch alone, and to recall what he had
+then said to her; and when everything had come back it was quite, at
+first, for a moment, as if he had said something that immensely
+mattered. He hadn't, however, in fact; it was only as if he might
+perhaps after all have been going to. It was on the sixth--within ten
+days of their sailing--that she had hurried from Boston under the
+alarm, a small but a sufficient shock, of hearing that Mildred had
+suddenly been taken ill, had had, from some obscure cause, such an
+upset as threatened to stay their journey. The bearing of the accident
+had happily soon announced itself as slight, and there had been, in the
+event, but a few hours of anxiety; the journey had been pronounced
+again not only possible, but, as representing "change," highly
+advisable; and if the zealous guest had had five minutes by herself
+with the doctor, that was, clearly, no more at his instance than at her
+own. Almost nothing had passed between them but an easy exchange of
+enthusiasms in respect to the remedial properties of "Europe"; and this
+assurance, as the facts came back to her, she was now able to give.
+"Nothing whatever, on my word of honour, that you mayn't know or
+mightn't then have known. I've no secret with him about you. What makes
+you suspect it? I don't quite make out how you know I did see him
+alone."
+
+"No--you never told me," said Milly. "And I don't mean," she went on,
+"during the twenty-four hours while I was bad, when your putting your
+heads together was natural enough. I mean after I was better--the last
+thing before you went home."
+
+Mrs. Stringham continued to wonder. "Who told you I saw him then?"
+
+_"He_ didn't himself--nor did you write me it afterwards. We speak of
+it now for the first time. That's exactly why!" Milly declared--with
+something in her face and voice that, the next moment, betrayed for her
+companion that she had really known nothing, had only conjectured and,
+chancing her charge, made a hit. Yet why had her mind been busy with
+the question? "But if you're not, as you now assure me, in his
+confidence," she smiled, "it's no matter."
+
+"I'm not in his confidence, and he had nothing to confide. But are you
+feeling unwell?"
+
+The elder woman was earnest for the truth, though the possibility she
+named was not at all the one that seemed to fit--witness the long climb
+Milly had just indulged in. The girl showed her constant white face,
+but that her friends had all learned to discount, and it was often
+brightest when superficially not bravest. She continued for a little
+mysteriously to smile. "I don't know--haven't really the least idea.
+But it might be well to find out."
+
+Mrs. Stringham, at this, flared into sympathy. "Are you in trouble--in
+pain?"
+
+"Not the least little bit. But I sometimes wonder----!"
+
+"Yes"--she pressed: "wonder what?"
+
+"Well, if I shall have much of it."
+
+Mrs. Stringham stared. "Much of what? Not of pain?"
+
+"Of everything. Of everything I have."
+
+Anxiously again, tenderly, our friend cast about. "You 'have'
+everything; so that when you say 'much' of it----"
+
+"I only mean," the girl broke in, "shall I have it for long? That is if
+I _have_ got it."
+
+She had at present the effect, a little, of confounding, or at least of
+perplexing her comrade, who was touched, who was always touched, by
+something helpless in her grace and abrupt in her turns, and yet
+actually half made out in her a sort of mocking light. "If you've got
+an ailment?"
+
+"If I've got everything," Milly laughed.
+
+"Ah, _that_--like almost nobody else."
+
+"Then for how long?"
+
+Mrs. Stringham's eyes entreated her; she had gone close to her, half
+enclosed her with urgent arms. "Do you want to see some one?" And then
+as the girl only met it with a slow headshake, though looking perhaps a
+shade more conscious: "We'll go straight to the best near doctor." This
+too, however, produced but a gaze of qualified assent and a silence,
+sweet and vague, that left everything open. Our friend decidedly lost
+herself. "Tell me, for God's sake, if you're in distress."
+
+"I don't think I've really _everything,"_ Milly said as if to
+explain--and as if also to put it pleasantly.
+
+"But what on earth can I do for you?" The girl hesitated, then seemed
+on the point of being able to say; but suddenly changed and expressed
+herself otherwise. "Dear, dear thing--I'm only too happy!"
+
+It brought them closer, but it rather confirmed Mrs. Stringham's doubt.
+"Then what's the matter?"
+
+"That's the matter--that I can scarcely bear it."
+
+"But what is it you think you haven't got?"
+
+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. "Whom will you see?"--for it
+was as if they looked down from their height at a continent of doctors.
+"Where will you first go?"
+
+Milly had for the third time her air of consideration; but she came
+back with it to her plea of some minutes before. "I'll tell you at
+supper--good-bye till then." And she left the room with a lightness
+that testified for her companion to something that again particularly
+pleased her in the renewed promise of motion. The odd passage just
+concluded, Mrs. Stringham mused as she once more sat alone with a
+hooked needle and a ball of silk, the "fine" work with which she was
+always provided--this mystifying mood had simply been precipitated, no
+doubt, by their prolonged halt, with which the girl hadn't really been
+in sympathy. One had only to admit that her complaint was in fact but
+the excess of the joy of life, and everything _did_ then fit. She
+couldn't stop for the joy, but she could go on for it, and with the
+sense of going on she floated again, was restored to her great spaces.
+There was no evasion of any truth--so at least Susan Shepherd hoped--in
+one's sitting there while the twilight deepened and feeling still more
+finely that the position of this young lady was magnificent. The
+evening at that height had naturally turned to cold, and the travellers
+had bespoken a fire with their meal; the great Alpine road asserted its
+brave presence through the small panes of the low, clean windows, with
+incidents at the inn-door, the yellow _diligence,_ the great waggons,
+the hurrying, hooded, private conveyances, reminders, for our fanciful
+friend, of old stories, old pictures, historic flights, escapes,
+pursuits, things that had happened, things indeed that by a sort of
+strange congruity helped her to read the meanings of the greatest
+interest into the relation in which she was now so deeply involved. It
+was natural that this record of the magnificence of her companion's
+position should strike her as, after all, the best meaning she could
+extract; for she herself was seated in the magnificence as in a
+court-carriage--she came back to that, and such a method of
+progression, such a view from crimson cushions, would evidently have a
+great deal more to give. By the time the candles were lighted for
+supper and the short, white curtains were drawn, Milly had reappeared,
+and the little scenic room had then all its romance. That charm
+moreover was far from broken by the words in which she, without further
+loss of time, satisfied her patient mate. "I want to go straight to
+London."
+
+It was unexpected, corresponding with no view positively taken at their
+departure; when England had appeared, on the contrary, rather relegated
+and postponed--seen for the moment, as who should say, at the end of an
+avenue of preparations and introductions. London, in short, might have
+been supposed to be the crown, and to be achieved like a siege by
+gradual approaches. Milly's actual fine stride was therefore the more
+exciting, as any simplification almost always was to Mrs. Stringham;
+who, besides, was afterwards to recall as the very beginning of a drama
+the terms in which, between their smoky candles, the girl had put her
+preference and in which still other things had come up, come while the
+clank of waggon-chains in the sharp air reached their ears, with the
+stamp of hoofs, the rattle of buckets and the foreign questions,
+foreign answers, that were all alike a part of the cheery converse of
+the road. The girl brought it out in truth as she might have brought a
+huge confession, something she admitted herself shy about and that
+would seem to show her as frivolous; it had rolled over her that what
+she wanted of Europe was "people," so far as they were to be had, and
+that if her friend really wished to know, the vision of this same
+equivocal quantity was what had haunted her during their previous days,
+in museums and churches, and what was again spoiling for her the pure
+taste of scenery. She was all for scenery--yes; but she wanted it human
+and personal, and all she could say was that there would be in
+London--wouldn't there? more of that kind than anywhere else. She came
+back to her idea that if it wasn't for long--if nothing should happen
+to be so for _her_--why, the particular thing she spoke of would
+probably have most to give her in the time, would probably be less than
+anything else a waste of her remainder. She produced this last
+consideration indeed with such gaiety that Mrs. Stringham was not again
+disconcerted by it, was in fact quite ready--if talk of early dying was
+in order--to match it from her own future. Good, then; they would, eat
+and drink because of what might happen to-morrow; and they would direct
+their course from that moment with a view to such eating and drinking.
+They ate and drank that night, in truth, as if in the spirit of this
+decision; whereby the air, before they separated, felt itself the
+clearer.
+
+It had cleared perhaps to a view only too extensive--extensive, that
+is, in proportion to the signs of life presented. The idea of "people"
+was not so entertained on Milly's part as to connect itself with
+particular persons, and the fact remained for each of the ladies that
+they would, completely unknown, disembark at Dover amid the completely
+unknowing. They had no relation already formed; this plea Mrs.
+Stringham put forward to see what it would produce. It produced nothing
+at first but the observation on the girl's side that what she had in
+mind was no thought of society nor of scraping acquaintance; nothing
+was further from her than to desire the opportunities represented for
+the compatriot in general by a trunkful of "letters." It wasn't a
+question, in short, of the people the compatriot was after; it was the
+human, the English picture itself, as they might see it in their own
+way--the world imagined always in what one had read and dreamed. Mrs.
+Stringham did every justice to this world, but when later on an
+occasion chanced to present itself, she made a point of not omitting to
+remark that it might be a comfort to know in advance even an
+individual. This still, however, failed in vulgar parlance, to "fetch"
+Milly, so that she had presently to go all the way. "Haven't I
+understood from you, for that matter, that you gave Mr. Densher
+something of a promise?"
+
+There was a moment, on this, when Milly's look had to be taken as
+representing one of two things--either that she was completely vague
+about the promise or that Mr. Densher's name itself started no train.
+But she really couldn't be so vague about the promise, her
+interlocutress quickly saw, without attaching it to something; it had
+to be a promise to somebody in particular to be so repudiated. In the
+event, accordingly, she acknowledged Mr. Merton Densher, the so
+unusually clever young Englishman who had made his appearance in New
+York on some special literary business--wasn't it?--shortly before
+their departure, and who had been three or four times in her house
+during the brief period between her visit to Boston and her companion's
+subsequent stay with her; but she required much reminding before it
+came back to her that she had mentioned to this companion just
+afterwards the confidence expressed by the personage in question in her
+never doing so dire a thing as to come to London without, as the phrase
+was, looking a fellow up. She had left him the enjoyment of his
+confidence, the form of which might have appeared a trifle free--that
+she now reasserted; she had done nothing either to impair or to enhance
+it; but she had also left Mrs. Stringham, in the connection and at the
+time, rather sorry to have missed Mr. Densher. She had thought of him
+again after that, the elder woman; she had likewise gone so far as to
+notice that Milly appeared not to have done so--which the girl might
+easily have betrayed; and, interested as she was in everything that
+concerned her, she had made out for herself, for herself only and
+rather idly, that, but for interruptions, the young Englishman might
+have become a better acquaintance. His being an acquaintance at all was
+one of the signs that in the first days had helped to place Milly, as a
+young person with the world before her, for sympathy and wonder.
+Isolated, unmothered, unguarded, but with her other strong marks, her
+big house, her big fortune, her big freedom, she had lately begun to
+"receive," for all her few years, as an older woman might have done--as
+was done, precisely, by princesses who had public considerations to
+observe and who came of age very early. If it was thus distinct to Mrs.
+Stringham then that Mr. Densher had gone off somewhere else in
+connection with his errand before her visit to New York, it had been
+also not undiscoverable that he had come back for a day or two later
+on, that is after her own second excursion--that he had in fine
+reappeared on a single occasion on his way to the West: his way from
+Washington as she believed, though he was out of sight at the time of
+her joining her friend for their departure. It had not occurred to her
+before to exaggerate--it had not occurred to her that she could; but
+she seemed to become aware to-night that there had been just enough in
+this relation to meet, to provoke, the free conception of a little more.
+
+She presently put it that, at any rate, promise or no promise, Milly
+would, at a pinch, be able, in London, to act on his permission to make
+him a sign; to which Milly replied with readiness that her ability,
+though evident, would be none the less quite wasted, inasmuch as the
+gentleman would, to a certainty, be still in America. He had a great
+deal to do there--which he would scarce have begun; and in fact she
+might very well not have thought of London at all if she hadn't been
+sure he wasn't yet near coming back. It was perceptible to her
+companion that the moment our young woman had so far committed herself
+she had a sense of having overstepped; which was not quite patched up
+by her saying the next minute, possibly with a certain failure of
+presence of mind, that the last thing she desired was the air of
+running after him. Mrs. Stringham wondered privately what question
+there could be of any such appearance--the danger of which thus
+suddenly came up; but she said, for the time, nothing of it--she only
+said other things: one of which was, for instance, that if Mr. Densher
+was away he was away, and that this was the end of it; also that of
+course they must be discreet at any price. But what was the measure of
+discretion, and how was one to be sure? So it was that, as they sat
+there, she produced her own case: _she_ had a possible tie with London,
+which she desired as little to disown as she might wish to risk
+presuming on it. She treated her companion, in short, for their
+evening's end, to the story of Maud Manningham, the odd but interesting
+English girl who had formed her special affinity in the old days at the
+Vevey school; whom she had written to, after their separation, with a
+regularity that had at first faltered and then altogether failed, yet
+that had been for the time quite a fine case of crude constancy; so
+that it had in fact flickered up again of itself on the occasion of the
+marriage of each. They had then once more fondly, scrupulously
+written--Mrs. Lowder first; and even another letter or two had
+afterwards passed. This, however, had been the end--though with no
+rupture, only a gentle drop: Maud Manningham had made, she believed, a
+great marriage, while she herself had made a small; on top of which,
+moreover, distance, difference, diminished community and impossible
+reunion had done the rest of the work. It was but after all these years
+that reunion had begun to show as possible--if the other party to it,
+that is, should be still in existence. That was exactly what it now
+struck our friend as interesting to ascertain, as, with one aid and
+another, she believed she might. It was an experiment she would at all
+events now make if Milly didn't object.
+
+Milly in general objected to nothing, and, though she asked a question
+or two, she raised no present plea. Her questions--or at least her own
+answers to them--kindled, on Mrs. Stringham's part, a backward train:
+she hadn't known till tonight how much she remembered, or how fine it
+might be to see what had become of large, high-coloured Maud, florid,
+exotic and alien--which had been just the spell--even to the
+perceptions of youth. There was the danger--she frankly touched
+it--that such a temperament mightn't have matured, with the years, all
+in the sense of fineness; it was the sort of danger that, in renewing
+relations after long breaks, one had always to look in the face. To
+gather in strayed threads was to take a risk--for which, however, she
+was prepared if Milly was. The possible "fun," she confessed, was by
+itself rather tempting; and she fairly sounded, with this--wound up a
+little as she was--the note of fun as the harmless final right of fifty
+years of mere New England virtue. Among the things she was afterwards
+to recall was the indescribable look dropped on her, at this, by her
+companion; she was still seated there between the candles and before
+the finished supper, while Milly moved about, and the look was long to
+figure for her as an inscrutable comment on _her_ notion of freedom.
+Challenged, at any rate, as for the last wise word, Milly showed
+perhaps, musingly, charmingly, that, though her attention had been
+mainly soundless, her friend's story--produced as a resource
+unsuspected, a card from up the sleeve--half surprised, half beguiled
+her. Since the matter, such as it was, depended on that, she brought
+out, before she went to bed, an easy, a light "Risk everything!"
+
+This quality in it seemed possibly a little to deny weight to Maud
+Lowder's evoked presence--as Susan Stringham, still sitting up, became,
+in excited reflection, a trifle more conscious. Something determinant,
+when the girl had left her, took place in her--nameless but, as soon as
+she had given way, coercive. It was as if she knew again, in this
+fulness of time, that she had been, after Maud's marriage, just
+sensibly outlived or, as people nowadays said, shunted. Mrs. Lowder had
+left her behind, and on the occasion, subsequently, of the
+corresponding date in her own life--not the second, the sad one, with
+its dignity of sadness, but the first, with the meagreness of its
+supposed felicity--she had been, in the same spirit, almost
+patronisingly pitied. If that suspicion, even when it had ceased to
+matter, had never quite died out for her, there was doubtless some
+oddity in its now offering itself as a link, rather than as another
+break, in the chain; and indeed there might well have been for her a
+mood in which the notion of the development of patronage in her quondam
+schoolmate would have settled her question in another sense. It was
+actually settled--if the case be worth our analysis--by the happy
+consummation, the poetic justice, the generous revenge, of her having
+at last something to show. Maud, on their parting company, had appeared
+to have so much, and would now--for wasn't it also, in general, quite
+the rich law of English life?--have, with accretions, promotions,
+expansions, ever so much more. Very good; such things might be; she
+rose to the sense of being ready for them. Whatever Mrs. Lowder might
+have to show--and one hoped one did the presumptions all justice--she
+would have nothing like Milly Theale, who constituted the trophy
+producible by poor Susan. Poor Susan lingered late--till the candles
+were low, and as soon as the table was cleared she opened her neat
+portfolio. She had not lost the old clue; there were connections she
+remembered, addresses she could try; so the thing was to begin. She
+wrote on the spot.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FOURTH
+
+VII
+
+It had all gone so fast after this that Milly uttered but the truth
+nearest to hand in saying to the gentleman on her right--who was, by
+the same token, the gentleman on her hostess's left--that she scarce
+even then knew where she was: the words marking her first full sense of
+a situation really romantic. They were already dining, she and her
+friend, at Lancaster Gate, and surrounded, as it seemed to her, with
+every English accessory; though her consciousness of Mrs. Lowder's
+existence, and still more of her remarkable identity, had been of so
+recent and so sudden a birth. Susie, as she was apt to call her
+companion for a lighter change, had only had to wave a neat little wand
+for the fairy-tale to begin at once; in consequence of which Susie now
+glittered--for, with Mrs. Stringham's new sense of success, it came to
+that--in the character of a fairy godmother. Milly had almost insisted
+on dressing her, for the present occasion, as one; and it was no fault
+of the girl's if the good lady had not now appeared in a peaked hat, a
+short petticoat and diamond shoe-buckles, brandishing the magic crutch.
+The good lady, in truth, bore herself not less contentedly than if
+these insignia had marked her work; and Milly's observation to Lord
+Mark had just been, doubtless, the result of such a light exchange of
+looks with her as even the great length of the table had not baffled.
+There were twenty persons between them, but this sustained passage was
+the sharpest sequel yet to that other comparison of views during the
+pause on the Swiss pass. It almost appeared to Milly that their fortune
+had been unduly precipitated--as if, properly, they were in the
+position of having ventured on a small joke and found the answer out of
+proportion grave. She could not at this moment, for instance, have said
+whether, with her quickened perceptions, she were more enlivened or
+oppressed; and the case might in fact have been serious had she not, by
+good fortune, from the moment the picture loomed, quickly made up her
+mind that what finally most concerned her was neither to seek nor to
+shirk, was not even to wonder too much, but was to let things come as
+they would, since there was little enough doubt of how they would go.
+
+Lord Mark had been brought to her before dinner--not by Mrs. Lowder,
+but by the handsome girl, that lady's niece, who was now at the other
+end and on the same side as Susie; he had taken her in, and she meant
+presently to ask him about Miss Croy, the handsome girl, actually
+offered to her sight--though now in a splendid way--but for the second
+time. The first time had been the occasion--only three days before--of
+her calling at their hotel with her aunt and then making, for our other
+two heroines, a great impression of beauty and eminence. This
+impression had remained so with Milly that, at present, and although
+her attention was aware at the same time of everything else, her eyes
+were mainly engaged with Kate Croy when not engaged with Susie. That
+wonderful creature's eyes moreover readily met them--she ranked now as
+a wonderful creature; and it seemed a part of the swift prosperity of
+the American visitors that, so little in the original reckoning, she
+should yet appear conscious, charmingly, frankly conscious, of
+possibilities of friendship for them. Milly had easily and, as a guest,
+gracefully generalised: English girls had a special, strong beauty, and
+it particularly showed in evening dress--above all when, as was
+strikingly the case with this one, the dress itself was what it should
+be. That observation she had all ready for Lord Mark when they should,
+after a little, get round to it. She seemed even now to see that there
+might be a good deal they would get round to; the indication being
+that, taken up once for all with her other neighbour, their hostess
+would leave them much to themselves. Mrs. Lowder's other neighbour was
+the Bishop of Murrum--a real bishop, such as Milly had never seen, with
+a complicated costume, a voice like an old-fashioned wind instrument,
+and a face all the portrait of a prelate; while the gentleman on our
+young lady's left, a gentleman thick-necked, large and literal, who
+looked straight before him and as if he were not to be diverted by vain
+words from that pursuit, clearly counted as an offset to the possession
+of Lord Mark. As Milly made out these things--with a shade of
+exhilaration at the way she already fell in--she saw how she was
+justified of her plea for people and her love of life. It wasn't then,
+as the prospect seemed to show, so difficult to get into the current,
+or to stand, at any rate, on the bank. It was easy to get near--if they
+_were_ near; and yet the elements were different enough from any of her
+old elements, and positively rich and strange.
+
+She asked herself if her right-hand neighbour would understand what she
+meant by such a description of them, should she throw it off; but
+another of the things to which, precisely, her sense was awakened was
+that no, decidedly, he wouldn't. It was nevertheless by this time open
+to her that his line would be to be clever; and indeed, evidently, no
+little of the interest was going to be in the fresh reference and fresh
+effect both of people's cleverness and of their simplicity. She
+thrilled, she consciously flushed, and turned pale with the
+certitude--it had never been so present--that she should find herself
+completely involved: the very air of the place, the pitch of the
+occasion, had for her so positive a taste and so deep an undertone. The
+smallest things, the faces, the hands, the jewels of the women, the
+sound of words, especially of names, across the table, the shape of the
+forks, the arrangement of the flowers, the attitude of the servants,
+the walls of the room, were all touches in a picture and denotements in
+a play; and they marked for her, moreover, her alertness of vision. She
+had never, she might well believe, been in such a state of vibration;
+her sensibility was almost too sharp for her comfort: there were, for
+example, more indications than she could reduce to order in the manner
+of the friendly niece, who struck her as distinguished and interesting,
+as in fact surprisingly genial. This young woman's type had, visibly,
+other possibilities; yet here, of its own free movement, it had already
+sketched a relation. Were they, Miss Croy and she, to take up the tale
+where their two elders had left it off so many years before?--were they
+to find they liked each other and to try for themselves if a scheme of
+constancy on more modern lines could be worked? She had doubted, as
+they came to England, of Maud Manningham, had believed her a broken
+reed and a vague resource, had seen their dependence on her as a state
+of mind that would have been shamefully silly--so far as it _was_
+dependence--had they wished to do any thing so inane as "get into
+society." To have made their pilgrimage all for the sake of such
+society as Mrs. Lowder might have in reserve for them--that didn't bear
+thinking of at all, and she herself had quite chosen her course for
+curiosity about other matters. She would have described this curiosity
+as a desire to see the places she had read about, and _that_
+description of her motive she was prepared to give her neighbour--even
+though, as a consequence of it, he should find how little she had read.
+It was almost at present as if her poor prevision had been rebuked by
+the majesty--she could scarcely call it less--of the event, or at all
+events by the commanding character of the two figures--she could
+scarcely call _that_ less either--mainly presented. Mrs. Lowder and her
+niece, however dissimilar, had at least in common that each was a great
+reality. That was true, primarily, of the aunt--so true that Milly
+wondered how her own companion had arrived, in other days, at so odd an
+alliance; yet she none the less felt Mrs. Lowder as a person of whom
+the mind might in two or three days roughly make the circuit. She would
+sit there massive, at least, while one attempted it; whereas Miss Croy,
+the handsome girl, would indulge in incalculable movements that might
+interfere with one's tour. She was real, none the less, and everything
+and everybody were real; and it served them right, no doubt, the pair
+of them, for having rushed into their adventure.
+
+Lord Mark's intelligence meanwhile, however, had met her own quite
+sufficiently to enable him to tell her how little he could clear up her
+situation. He explained, for that matter--or at least he hinted--that
+there was no such thing, to-day in London, as saying where any one was.
+Every one was everywhere--nobody was anywhere. He should be put to
+it--yes, frankly--to give a name of any sort or kind to their hostess's
+"set." _Was_ it a set at all, or wasn't it, and were there not really
+no such things as sets, in the place, any more?--was there any thing
+but the senseless shifting tumble, like that of some great greasy sea
+in mid-Channel, of an overwhelming melted mixture? He threw out the
+question, which seemed large; Milly felt that at the end of five
+minutes he had thrown out a great many, though he followed none more
+than a step or two; perhaps he would prove suggestive, but he helped
+her as yet to no discriminations: he spoke as if he had given them up
+from too much knowledge. He was thus at the opposite extreme from
+herself, but, as a consequence of it, also wandering and lost; and he
+was furthermore, for all his temporary incoherence, to which she
+guessed there would be some key, as great a reality as either Mrs.
+Lowder or Kate. The only light in which he placed the former of these
+ladies was that of an extraordinary woman--a most extraordinary woman,
+and "the more extraordinary the more one knows her," while of the
+latter he said nothing, for the moment, but that she was tremendously,
+yes, quite tremendously, good-looking. It was some time, she thought,
+before his talk showed his cleverness, and yet each minute she believed
+in it more, quite apart from what her hostess had told her on first
+naming him. Perhaps he was one of the cases she had heard of at
+home--those characteristic cases of people in England who concealed
+their play of mind so much more than they showed it. Even Mr. Densher a
+little did that. And what made Lord Mark, at any rate, so real either,
+when this was a thing he so definitely insisted on? His type some how,
+as by a life, a need, an intention of its own, insisted _for_ him; but
+that was all. It was difficult to guess his age--whether he were a
+young man who looked old or an old man who looked young; it seemed to
+prove nothing, as against other things, that he was bald and, as might
+have been said, slightly stale, or, more delicately perhaps, dry: there
+was such a fine little fidget of preoccupied life in him, and his eyes,
+at moments--though it was an appearance they could suddenly lose--were
+as candid and clear as those of a pleasant boy. Very neat, very light,
+and so fair that there was little other indication of his moustache
+than his constantly feeling it--which was again boyish--he would have
+affected her as the most intellectual person present if he had not
+affected her as the most frivolous. The latter quality was rather in
+his look than in anything else, though he constantly wore his double
+eyeglass, which was, much more, Bostonian and thoughtful.
+
+The idea of his frivolity had, no doubt, to do with his personal
+designation, which represented--as yet, for our young woman, a little
+confusedly--a connection with an historic patriciate, a class that, in
+turn, also confusedly, represented an affinity with a social element
+that she had never heard otherwise described than as "fashion." The
+supreme social element in New York had never known itself but as
+reduced to that category, and though Milly was aware that, as applied
+to a territorial and political aristocracy, the label was probably too
+simple, she had for the time none other at hand. She presently, it is
+true, enriched her idea with the perception that her interlocutor was
+indifferent; yet this, indifferent as aristocracies notoriously were,
+saw her but little further, inasmuch as she felt that, in the first
+place, he would much rather get on with her than not, and in the second
+was only thinking of too many matters of his own. If he kept her in
+view on the one hand and kept so much else on the other--the way he
+crumbed up his bread was a proof--why did he hover before her as a
+potentially insolent noble? She couldn't have answered the question,
+and it was precisely one of those that swarmed. They were complicated,
+she might fairly have said, by his visibly knowing, having known from
+afar off, that she was a stranger and an American, and by his none the
+less making no more of it than if she and her like were the chief of
+his diet. He took her, kindly enough, but imperturbably, irreclaimably,
+for granted, and it wouldn't in the least help that she herself knew
+him, as quickly, for having been in her country and threshed it out.
+There would be nothing for her to explain or attenuate or brag about;
+she could neither escape nor prevail by her strangeness; he would have,
+for that matter, on such a subject, more to tell her than to learn from
+her. She might learn from _him_ why she was so different from the
+handsome girl--which she didn't know, being merely able to feel it; or
+at any rate might learn from him why the handsome girl was so different
+from her.
+
+On these lines, however, they would move later; the lines immediately
+laid down were, in spite of his vagueness for his own convenience,
+definite enough. She was already, he observed to her, thinking what she
+should say on her other side--which was what Americans were always
+doing. She needn't in conscience say anything at all; but Americans
+never knew that, nor ever, poor creatures, yes (_she_ had interposed
+the "poor creatures!") what not to do. The burdens they took on--the
+things, positively, they made an affair of! This easy and, after all,
+friendly jibe at her race was really for her, on her new friend's part,
+the note of personal recognition so far as she required it; and she
+gave him a prompt and conscious example of morbid anxiety by insisting
+that her desire to be, herself, "lovely" all round was justly founded
+on the lovely way Mrs. Lowder had met her. He was directly interested
+in that, and it was not till afterwards that she fully knew how much
+more information about their friend he had taken than given. Here
+again, for instance, was a pertinent note for her: she had, on the
+spot, with her first plunge into the obscure depths of a society
+constituted from far back, encountered the interesting phenomenon of
+complicated, of possibly sinister motive. However, Maud Manningham (her
+name, even in her presence, somehow still fed the fancy) _had,_ all the
+same, been lovely, and one was going to meet her now quite as far on as
+one had one's self been met. She had been with them at their
+hotel--they were a pair--before even they had supposed she could have
+got their letter. Of course indeed they had written in advance, but
+they had followed that up very fast. She had thus engaged them to dine
+but two days later, and on the morrow again, without waiting for a
+return visit, waiting for anything, she had called with her niece. It
+was as if she really cared for them, and it was magnificent
+fidelity--fidelity to Mrs. Stringham, her own companion and Mrs.
+Lowder's former schoolmate, the lady with the charming face and the
+rather high dress down there at the end.
+
+Lord Mark took in through his nippers these balanced attributes of
+Susie. "But isn't Mrs. Stringham's fidelity then equally magnificent?"
+
+"Well, it's a beautiful sentiment; but it isn't as if she had anything
+to _give."_
+
+"Hasn't she got you?" Lord Mark presently asked.
+
+"Me--to give Mrs. Lowder?" Milly had clearly not yet seen herself in
+the light of such an offering. "Oh, I'm rather a poor present; and I
+don't feel as if, even at that, I've as yet quite been given."
+
+"You've been shown, and if our friend has jumped at you it comes to the
+same thing." He made his jokes, Lord Mark, without amusement for
+himself; yet it wasn't that he was grim. "To be seen you must
+recognise, _is,_ for you, to be jumped at; and, if it's a question of
+being shown, here you are again. Only it has now been taken out of your
+friend's hands; it's Mrs. Lowder, already, who's getting the benefit.
+Look round the table and you'll make out, I think, that you're being,
+from top to bottom, jumped at."
+
+"Well, then," said Milly, "I seem also to feel that I like it better
+than being made fun of."
+
+It was one of the things she afterwards saw--Milly was for ever seeing
+things afterwards--that her companion had here had some way of his own,
+quite unlike any one's else, of assuring her of his consideration. She
+wondered how he had done it, for he had neither apologised nor
+protested. She said to herself, at any rate, that he had led her on;
+and what was most odd was the question by which he had done so. "Does
+she know much about you?"
+
+"No, she just likes us."
+
+Even for this his travelled lordship, seasoned and saturated, had no
+laugh. "I mean _you_ particularly. Has that lady with the charming
+face, which _is_ charming, told her?"
+
+Milly hesitated. "Told her what?"
+
+"Everything."
+
+This, with the way he dropped it, again considerably moved her--made
+her feel for a moment that, as a matter of course, she was a subject
+for disclosures. But she quickly found her answer. "Oh, as for that,
+you must ask _her."_
+
+"Your clever companion?"
+
+"Mrs. Lowder."
+
+He replied to this that their hostess was a person with whom there were
+certain liberties one never took, but that he was none the less fairly
+upheld, inasmuch as she was for the most part kind to him and as,
+should he be very good for a while, she would probably herself tell
+him. "And I shall have, at any rate, in the meantime, the interest of
+seeing what she does with you. That will teach me more or less, you
+see, how much she knows."
+
+Milly followed this--it was lucid; but it suggested something apart.
+"How much does she know about _you?"_
+
+"Nothing," said Lord Mark serenely. "But that doesn't matter--for what
+she does with me." And then, as to anticipate Milly's question about
+the nature of such doing: "This, for instance--turning me straight on
+for _you."_
+
+The girl thought. "And you mean she wouldn't if she did know----?"
+
+He met it as if it were really a point. "No. I believe, to do her
+justice, she still would. So you can be easy."
+
+Milly had the next instant, then, acted on the permission. "Because
+you're even at the worst the best thing she has?"
+
+With this he was at last amused. "I was till you came. You're the best
+now."
+
+It was strange his words should have given her the sense of his
+knowing, but it was positive that they did so, and to the extent of
+making her believe them, though still with wonder. That, really, from
+this first of their meetings, was what was most to abide with her: she
+accepted almost helplessly, she surrendered to the inevitability of
+being the sort of thing, as he might have said, that he at least
+thoroughly believed he had, in going about, seen here enough of for all
+practical purposes. Her submission was naturally, moreover, not to be
+impaired by her learning later on that he had paid at short intervals,
+though at a time apparently just previous to her own emergence from the
+obscurity of extreme youth, three separate visits to New York, where
+his nameable friends and his contrasted contacts had been numerous. His
+impression, his recollection of the whole mixed quantity, was still
+visibly rich. It had helped him to place her, and she was more and more
+sharply conscious of having--as with the door sharply slammed upon her
+and the guard's hand raised in signal to the train--been popped into
+the compartment in which she was to travel for him. It was a use of her
+that many a girl would have been doubtless quick to resent; and the
+kind of mind that thus, in our young lady, made all for mere seeing and
+taking is precisely one of the charms of our subject. Milly had
+practically just learned from him, had made out, as it were, from her
+rumbling compartment, that he gave her the highest place among their
+friend's actual properties. She was a success, that was what it came
+to, he presently assured her, and that was what it was to be a success:
+it always happened before one could know it. One's ignorance was in
+fact often the greatest part of it. "You haven't had time yet," he
+said; "this is nothing. But you'll see. You'll see everything. You can,
+you know--everything you dream of."
+
+He made her more and more wonder; she almost felt as if he were showing
+her visions while he spoke; and strangely enough, though it was visions
+that had drawn her on, she hadn't seen them in connection--that is in
+such preliminary and necessary connection--with such a face as Lord
+Mark's, such eyes and such a voice, such a tone and such a manner. He
+had for an instant the effect of making her ask herself if she were
+after all going to be afraid; so distinct was it for fifty seconds that
+a fear passed over her. There they were again--yes, certainly: Susie's
+overture to Mrs. Lowder had been their joke, but they had pressed in
+that gaiety an electric bell that continued to sound. Positively, while
+she sat there, she had the loud rattle in her ears, and she wondered,
+during these moments, why the others didn't hear it. They didn't stare,
+they didn't smile, and the fear in her that I speak of was but her own
+desire to stop it. That dropped, however, as if the alarm itself had
+ceased; she seemed to have seen in a quick, though tempered glare that
+there were two courses for her, one to leave London again the first
+thing in the morning, the other to do nothing at all. Well, she would
+do nothing at all; she was already doing it; more than that, she had
+already done it, and her chance was gone. She gave herself up--she had
+the strangest sense, on the spot, of so deciding; for she had turned a
+corner before she went on again with Lord Mark. Inexpressive, but
+intensely significant, he met as no one else could have done the very
+question she had suddenly put to Mrs. Stringham on the Brünig. Should
+she have it, whatever she did have, that question had been, for long?
+"Ah, so possibly not," her neighbour appeared to reply; "therefore,
+don't you see? _I'm_ the way." It was vivid that he might be, in spite
+of his absence of flourish; the way being doubtless just _in_ that
+absence. The handsome girl, whom she didn't lose sight of and who, she
+felt, kept her also in view--Mrs. Lowder's striking niece would,
+perhaps, be the way as well, for in her too was the absence of
+flourish, though she had little else, so far as one could tell, in
+common with Lord Mark. Yet how indeed _could_ one tell, what did one
+understand, and of what was one, for that matter, provisionally
+conscious but of their being somehow together in what they represented?
+Kate Croy, fine but friendly, looked over at her as really with a guess
+at Lord Mark's effect on her. If she could guess this effect what then
+did she know about it and in what degree had she felt it herself? Did
+that represent, as between them, anything particular, and should she
+have to count with them as duplicating, as intensifying by a mutual
+intelligence, the relation into which she was sinking? Nothing was so
+odd as that she should have to recognise so quickly in each of these
+glimpses of an instant the various signs of a relation; and this
+anomaly itself, had she had more time to give to it, might well, might
+almost terribly have suggested to her that her doom was to live fast.
+It was queerly a question of the short run and the consciousness
+proportionately crowded.
+
+These were immense excursions for the spirit of a young person at Mrs.
+Lowder's mere dinner-party; but what was so significant and so
+admonitory as the fact of their being possible? What could they have
+been but just a part, already, of the crowded consciousness? And it was
+just a part, likewise, that while plates were changed and dishes
+presented and periods in the banquet marked; while appearances insisted
+and phenomena multiplied and words reached her from here and there like
+plashes of a slow, thick tide; while Mrs. Lowder grew somehow more
+stout and more instituted and Susie, at her distance and in comparison,
+more thinly improvised and more different--different, that is, from
+every one and everything: it was just a part that while this process
+went forward our young lady alighted, came back, taking up her destiny
+again as if she had been able by a wave or two of her wings to place
+herself briefly in sight of an alternative to it. Whatever it was it
+had showed in this brief interval as better than the alternative; and
+it now presented itself altogether in the image and in the place in
+which she had left it. The image was that of her being, as Lord Mark
+had declared, a success. This depended more or less of course on his
+idea of the thing--into which at present, however, she wouldn't go.
+But, renewing soon, she had asked him what he meant then that Mrs.
+Lowder would do with her, and he had replied that this might safely be
+left. "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."
+
+Lord Mark seemed, within the limits of his enthusiasm, to find this
+charming. "Ah, she strikes you as an idealist?"
+
+"She idealises _us,_ my friend and me, absolutely. She sees us in a
+light," said Milly. "That's all I've got to hold on by. So don't
+deprive me of it."
+
+"I wouldn't for the world. But do you think," he continued as if it
+were suddenly important for him--"do you think she sees _me_ in a
+light?"
+
+She neglected his question for a little, partly because her attention
+attached itself more and more to the handsome girl, partly because,
+placed so near their hostess, she wished not to show as discussing her
+too freely. Mrs. Lowder, it was true, steering in the other quarter a
+course in which she called at subjects as if they were islets in an
+archipelago, continued to allow them their ease, and Kate Croy, at the
+same time, steadily revealed herself as interesting. Milly in fact
+found, of a sudden, her ease--found it all--as she bethought herself
+that what Mrs. Lowder was really arranging for was a report on her
+quality and, as perhaps might be said, her value from Lord Mark. She
+wished him, the wonderful lady, to have no pretext for not knowing what
+he thought of Miss Theale. Why his judgment so mattered remained to be
+seen; but it was this divination, in any case, that now determined
+Milly's rejoinder. "No. She knows you. She has probably reason to. And
+you all, here, know each other--I see that--so far as you know
+anything. You know what you're used to, and it's your being used to
+it--that, and that only--that makes you. But there are things you don't
+know."
+
+He took it in as if it might fairly, to do him justice, be a point.
+"Things that _I_ don't--with all the pains I take and the way I've run
+about the world to leave nothing unlearned?"
+
+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. Lowder, however, only smiled on Milly for a sign that something
+racy was what she had expected, and resumed, with a splash of her
+screw, her cruise among the islands. "Oh, I've heard that," the young
+man replied, "before!"
+
+"There it is then. You've heard everything before. You've heard _me_ of
+course before, in my country, often enough."
+
+"Oh, never too often," he protested; "I'm sure I hope I shall still
+hear you again and again."
+
+"But what good then has it done you?" the girl went on as if now
+frankly to amuse him.
+
+"Oh, you'll see when you know me."
+
+"But, most assuredly, I shall never know you."
+
+"Then that will be exactly," he laughed, "the good!"
+
+If it established thus that they couldn't, or Wouldn't, mix, why, none
+the less, did Milly feel, through it, a perverse quickening of the
+relation to which she had been, in spite of herself, appointed?
+
+What queerer consequence of their not mixing than their talking--for it
+was what they had arrived at--almost intimately? She wished to get away
+from him, or indeed, much rather, away from herself so far as she was
+present to him. She saw already--wonderful creature, after all, herself
+too--that there would be a good deal more of him to come for her, and
+that the special sign of their intercourse would be to keep herself out
+of the question. Everything else might come in--only never that; and
+with such an arrangement they might even go far. This in fact might
+quite have begun, on the spot, with her returning again to the topic of
+the handsome girl. If she was to keep herself out she could naturally
+best do so by putting in somebody else. She accordingly put in Kate
+Croy, being ready to that extent--as she was not at all afraid for
+her--to sacrifice her if necessary. Lord Mark himself, for that matter,
+had made it easy by saying a little while before that no one among them
+did anything for nothing. "What then"--she was aware of being
+abrupt--"does Miss Croy, if she's so interested, do it for? What has
+she to gain by _her_ lovely welcome? Look at her _now!"_ Milly broke
+out with characteristic freedom of praise, though pulling herself up
+also with a compunctious "Oh!" as the direction thus given to their
+eyes happened to coincide with a turn of Kate's face to them. All she
+had meant to do was to insist that this face was fine; but what she had
+in fact done was to renew again her effect of showing herself to its
+possessor as conjoined with Lord Mark for some interested view of it.
+He had, however, promptly met her question.
+
+"To gain? Why, your acquaintance."
+
+"Well, what's my acquaintance to her? She can care for me--she must
+feel that--only by being sorry for me; and that's why she's lovely: to
+be already willing to take the trouble to be. It's the height of the
+disinterested."
+
+There were more things in this than one that Lord Mark might have taken
+up; but in a minute he had made his choice. "Ah then, I'm nowhere, for
+I'm afraid _I'm_ not sorry for you in the least. What do you make
+then," he asked, "of your success?"
+
+"Why, just the great reason of all. It's just because our friend there
+sees it that she pities me. She understands," Milly said; "she's better
+than any of you. She's beautiful."
+
+He appeared struck with this at last--with the point the girl made of
+it; to which she came back even after a diversion created by a dish
+presented between them. "Beautiful in character, I see. _Is_ she so?
+You must tell me about her."
+
+Milly wondered. "But haven't you known her longer than I? Haven't you
+seen her for yourself?"
+
+"No--I've failed with her. It's no use. I don't make her out. And I
+assure you I really should like to." His assurance had in fact for his
+companion a positive suggestion of sincerity; he affected her as now
+saying something that he felt; and she was the more struck with it as
+she was still conscious of the failure even of curiosity he had just
+shown in respect to herself. She had meant something--though indeed for
+herself almost only--in speaking of their friend's natural pity; it had
+been a note, doubtless, of questionable taste, but it had quavered out
+in spite of her; and he had not so much as cared to inquire "Why
+'natural'?" Not that it wasn't really much better for her that he
+shouldn't: explanations would in truth have taken her much too far.
+Only she now perceived that, in comparison, her word about this other
+person really "drew" him; and there were things in that, probably, many
+things, as to which she would learn more and which glimmered there
+already as part and parcel of that larger "real" with which, in her new
+situation, she was to be beguiled. It was in fact at the very moment,
+this element, not absent from what Lord Mark was further saying. "So
+you're wrong, you see, as to our knowing all about each other. There
+are cases where we break down. I at any rate give _her_ up--up, that
+is, to you. You must do her for me--tell me, I mean, when you know
+more. You'll notice," he pleasantly wound up, "that I've confidence in
+you."
+
+"Why shouldn't you have?" Milly asked, observing in this, as she
+thought, a fine, though, for such a man, a surprisingly artless,
+fatuity. It was as if there might have been a question of her
+falsifying for the sake of her own show--that is of her honesty not
+being proof against her desire to keep well with him herself. She
+didn't, none the less, otherwise protest against his remark; there was
+something else she was occupied in seeing. It was the handsome girl
+alone, one of his own species and his own society, who had made him
+feel uncertain; of his certainties about a mere little American, a
+cheap exotic, imported almost wholesale, and whose habitat, with its
+conditions of climate, growth, and cultivation, its immense profusion,
+but its few varieties and thin development, he was perfectly satisfied.
+The marvel was, too, that Milly understood his satisfaction--feeling
+that she expressed the truth in presently saying: "Of course; I make
+out that she must be difficult; just as I see that I myself must be
+easy." And that was what, for all the rest of this occasion, remained
+with her--as the most interesting thing that could remain. She was more
+and more content herself to be easy; she would have been resigned, even
+had it been brought straighter home to her, to passing for a cheap
+exotic. Provisionally, at any rate, that protected her wish to keep
+herself, with Lord Mark, in abeyance. They _had_ all affected her as
+inevitably knowing each other, and if the handsome girl's place among
+them was something even their initiation couldn't deal with--why, then,
+she would indeed be a quantity.
+
+
+VIII
+
+That sense of quantities, separate or mixed, was indeed doubtless what
+most prevailed at first for our slightly gasping American pair; it
+found utterance for them in their frequent remark to each other that
+they had no one but themselves to thank. It dropped from Milly more
+than once that if she had ever known it was so easy--! though her
+exclamation mostly ended without completing her idea. This, however,
+was a trifle to Mrs. Stringham, who cared little whether she meant that
+in this case she would have come sooner. She couldn't have come sooner,
+and she perhaps, on the contrary, meant--for it would have been like
+her--that she wouldn't have come at all; why it was so easy being at
+any rate a matter as to which her companion had begun quickly to pick
+up views. Susie kept some of these lights for the present to herself,
+since, freely communicated, they might have been a little disturbing;
+with which, moreover, the quantities that we speak of as surrounding
+the two ladies were, in many cases, quantities of things--and of other
+things--to talk about. Their immediate lesson, accordingly, was that
+they just had been caught up by the incalculable strength of a wave
+that was actually holding them aloft and that would naturally dash them
+wherever it liked. They meanwhile, we hasten to add, make the best of
+their precarious position, and if Milly had had no other help for it
+she would have found not a little in the sight of Susan Shepherd's
+state. The girl had had nothing to say to her, for three days, about
+the "success" announced by Lord Mark--which they saw, besides,
+otherwise established; she was too taken up, too touched, by Susie's
+own exaltation. Susie glowed in the light of her justified faith;
+everything had happened that she had been acute enough to think least
+probable; she had appealed to a possible delicacy in Maud Manningham--a
+delicacy, mind you, but _barely_ possible--and her appeal had been met
+in a way that was an honour to human nature. This proved sensibility of
+the lady of Lancaster Gate performed verily, for both our friends,
+during these first days, the office of a fine floating gold-dust,
+something that threw over the prospect a harmonising blur. The forms,
+the colours behind it were strong and deep--we have seen how they
+already stood out for Milly; but nothing, comparatively, had had so
+much of the dignity of truth as the fact of Maud's fidelity to a
+sentiment. That was what Susie was proud of, much more than of her
+great place in the world, which she was moreover conscious of not as
+yet wholly measuring. That was what was more vivid even than her
+being--in senses more worldly and in fact almost in the degree of a
+revelation--English and distinct and positive, with almost no inward,
+but with the finest outward resonance.
+
+Susan Shepherd's word for her, again and again, was that she was
+"large"; yet it was not exactly a case, as to the soul, of echoing
+chambers: she might have been likened rather to a capacious receptacle,
+originally perhaps loose, but now drawn as tightly as possible over its
+accumulated contents--a packed mass, for her American admirer, of
+curious detail. When the latter good lady, at home, had handsomely
+figured her friends as not small--which was the way she mostly figured
+them--there was a certain implication that they were spacious because
+they were empty. Mrs. Lowder, by a different law, was spacious because
+she was full, because she had something in common, even in repose, with
+a projectile, of great size, loaded and ready for use. That indeed, to
+Susie's romantic mind, announced itself as half the charm of their
+renewal--a charm as of sitting in springtime, during a long peace, on
+the daisied, grassy bank of some great slumbering fortress. True to her
+psychological instincts, certainly, Mrs. Stringham had noted that the
+"sentiment" she rejoiced in on her old schoolmate's part was all a
+matter of action and movement, was not, save for the interweaving of a
+more frequent plump "dearest" than she would herself perhaps have used,
+a matter of much other embroidery. She brooded, with interest, on this
+further remark of race, feeling in her own spirit a different economy.
+The joy, for her, was to know _why_ she acted--the reason was half the
+business; whereas with Mrs. Lowder there might have been no reason:
+"why" was the trivial seasoning-substance, the vanilla or the nutmeg,
+omittable from the nutritive pudding without spoiling it. Mrs. Lowder's
+desire was clearly sharp that their young companions should also
+prosper together; and Mrs. Stringham's account of it all to Milly,
+during the first days, was that when, at Lancaster Gate, she was not
+occupied in telling, as it were, about her, she was occupied in hearing
+much of the history of her hostess's brilliant niece.
+
+They had plenty, on these lines, the two elder women, to give and to
+take, and it was even not quite clear to the pilgrim from Boston that
+what she should mainly have arranged for in London was not a series of
+thrills for herself. She had a bad conscience, indeed almost a sense of
+immorality, in having to recognise that she was, as she said, carried
+away. She laughed to Milly when she also said that she didn't know
+where it would end; and the principal of her uneasiness was that Mrs.
+Lowder's life bristled for her with elements that she was really having
+to look at for the first time. They represented, she believed, the
+world, the world that, as a consequence of the cold shoulder turned to
+it by the Pilgrim Fathers, had never yet boldly crossed to Boston--it
+would surely have sunk the stoutest Cunarder--and she couldn't pretend
+that she faced the prospect simply because Milly had had a caprice. She
+was in the act herself of having one, directed precisely to their
+present spectacle. She could but seek strength in the thought that she
+had never had one--or had never yielded to one, which came to the same
+thing--before. The sustaining sense of it all, moreover, as literary
+material--that quite dropped from her. She must wait, at any rate, she
+should see: it struck her, so far as she had got, as vast, obscure,
+lurid. She reflected in the watches of the night that she was probably
+just going to love it for itself--that is for itself and Milly. The odd
+thing was that she could think of Milly's loving it without dread--or
+with dread, at least not on the score of conscience, only on the score
+of peace. It was a mercy, at all events, for the hour, that their
+fancies jumped together.
+
+While, for this first week that followed their dinner, she drank deep
+at Lancaster Gate, her companion was no less happily, appeared to be
+indeed on the whole quite as romantically, provided for. The handsome
+English girl from the heavy English house had been as a figure in a
+picture stepping by magic out of its frame: it was a case, in truth,
+for which Mrs. Stringham presently found the perfect image. She had
+lost none of her grasp, but quite the contrary, of that other conceit
+in virtue of which Milly was the wandering princess: so what could be
+more in harmony now than to see the princess waited upon at the city
+gate by the worthiest maiden, the chosen daughter of the burgesses? It
+was the real again, evidently, the amusement of the meeting for the
+princess too; princesses living for the most part, in such an appeased
+way, on the plane of mere elegant representation. That was why they
+pounced, at city gates, on deputed flower-strewing damsels; that was
+why, after effigies, processions, and other stately games, frank human
+company was pleasant to them. Kate Croy really presented herself to
+Milly--the latter abounded for Mrs. Stringham in accounts of it--as the
+wondrous London girl in person, by what she had conceived, from far
+back, of the London girl; conceived from the tales of travellers and
+the anecdotes of New York, from old porings over _Punch_ and a liberal
+acquaintance with the fiction of the day. The only thing was that she
+was nicer, for the creature in question had rather been, to our young
+woman, an image of dread. She had thought of her, at her best, as
+handsome just as Kate was, with turns of head and tones of voice,
+felicities of stature and attitude, things "put on" and, for that
+matter, put off, all the marks of the product of a packed society who
+should be at the same time the heroine of a strong story. She placed
+this striking young person from the first in a story, saw her, by a
+necessity of the imagination, for a heroine, felt it the only character
+in which she wouldn't be wasted; and this in spite of the heroine's
+pleasant abruptness, her forbearance from gush, her umbrellas and
+jackets and shoes--as these things sketched themselves to Milly--and
+something rather of a breezy boy in the carriage of her arms and the
+occasional freedom of her slang.
+
+When Milly had settled that the extent of her goodwill itself made her
+shy, she had found for the moment quite a sufficient key, and they were
+by that time thoroughly afloat together. This might well have been the
+happiest hour they were to know, attacking in friendly independence
+their great London--the London of shops and streets and suburbs oddly
+interesting to Milly, as well as of museums, monuments, "sights" oddly
+unfamiliar to Kate, while their elders pursued a separate course, both
+rejoicing in their intimacy and each thinking the other's young woman a
+great acquisition for her own. Milly expressed to Susan Shepherd more
+than once that Kate had some secret, some smothered trouble, besides
+all the rest of her history; and that if she had so good-naturedly
+helped Mrs. Lowder to meet them this was exactly to create a diversion,
+to give herself something else to think about. But on the case thus
+postulated our young American had as yet had no light: she only felt
+that when the light should come it would greatly deepen the colour; and
+she liked to think she was prepared for anything. What she already
+knew, moreover, was full to her vision, of English, of eccentric, of
+Thackerayan character, Kate Croy having gradually become not a little
+explicit on the subject of her situation, her past, her present, her
+general predicament, her small success, up to the present hour, in
+contenting at the same time her father, her sister, her aunt and
+herself. It was Milly's subtle guess, imparted to her Susie, that the
+girl had somebody else as well, as yet unnamed, to content, it being
+manifest that such a creature couldn't help having; a creature not
+perhaps, if one would, exactly formed to inspire passions, since that
+always implied a certain silliness, but essentially seen, by the
+admiring eye of friendship, under the clear shadow of some probably
+eminent male interest. The clear shadow, from whatever source
+projected, hung, at any rate, over Milly's companion the whole week,
+and Kate Croy's handsome face smiled out of it, under bland skylights,
+in the presence alike of old masters passive in their glory and of
+thoroughly new ones, the newest, who bristled restlessly with pins and
+brandished snipping shears.
+
+It was meanwhile a pretty part of the intercourse of these young ladies
+that each thought the other more remarkable than herself--that each
+thought herself, or assured the other she did, a comparatively dusty
+object and the other a favourite of nature and of fortune. Kate was
+amused, amazed at the way her friend insisted on "taking" her, and
+Milly wondered if Kate were sincere in finding her the most
+extraordinary--quite apart from her being the most charming--person she
+had come across. They had talked, in long drives, and quantities of
+history had not been wanting--in the light of which Mrs. Lowder's niece
+might superficially seem to have had the best of the argument. Her
+visitor's American references, with their bewildering immensities,
+their confounding moneyed New York, their excitements of high pressure,
+their opportunities of wild freedom, their record of used-up relatives,
+parents, clever, eager, fair, slim brothers--these the most loved--all
+engaged, as well as successive superseded guardians, in a high
+extravagance of speculation and dissipation that had left this
+exquisite being her black dress, her white face and her vivid hair as
+the mere last broken link: such a picture quite threw into the shade
+the brief biography, however sketchily amplified, of a mere
+middle-class nobody in Bayswater. And though that indeed might be but a
+Bayswater way of putting it, in addition to which Milly was in the
+stage of interest in Bayswater ways, this critic so far prevailed that,
+like Mrs. Stringham herself, she fairly got her companion to accept
+from her that she was quite the nearest approach to a practical
+princess Bayswater could hope ever to know. It was a fact--it became
+one at the end of three days--that Milly actually began to borrow from
+the handsome girl a sort of view of her state; the handsome girl's
+impression of it was clearly so sincere. This impression was a tribute,
+a tribute positively to power, power the source of which was the last
+thing Kate treated as a mystery. There were passages, under all their
+skylights, the succession of their shops being large, in which the
+latter's easy, yet the least bit dry manner sufficiently gave out that
+if she had had so deep a pocket----!
+
+It was not moreover by any means with not having the imagination of
+expenditure that she appeared to charge her friend, but with not having
+the imagination of terror, of thrift, the imagination or in any degree
+the habit of a conscious dependence on others. Such moments, when all
+Wigmore Street, for instance, seemed to rustle about and the pale girl
+herself to be facing the different rustlers, usually so
+undiscriminated, as individual Britons too, Britons personal, parties
+to a relation and perhaps even intrinsically remarkable--such moments
+in especial determined in Kate a perception of the high happiness of
+her companion's liberty. Milly's range was thus immense; she had to ask
+nobody for anything, to refer nothing to any one; her freedom, her
+fortune and her fancy were her law; an obsequious world surrounded her,
+she could sniff up at every step its fumes. And Kate, in these days,
+was altogether in the phase of forgiving her so much bliss; in the
+phase moreover of believing that, should they continue to go on
+together, she would abide in that generosity. She had, at such a point
+as this, no suspicion of a rift within the lute--by which we mean not
+only none of anything's coming between them, but none of any definite
+flaw in so much clearness of quality. Yet, all the same, if Milly, at
+Mrs. Lowder's banquet, had described herself to Lord Mark as kindly
+used by the young woman on the other side because of some faintly-felt
+special propriety in it, so there really did match with this,
+privately, on the young woman's part, a feeling not analysed but
+divided, a latent impression that Mildred Theale was not, after all, a
+person to change places, to change even chances with. Kate, verily,
+would perhaps not quite have known what she meant by this reservation,
+and she came near naming it only when she said to herself that, rich as
+Milly was, one probably wouldn't--which was singular--ever hate her for
+it. The handsome girl had, with herself, these felicities and
+crudities: it wasn't obscure to her that, without some very particular
+reason to help, it might have proved a test of one's philosophy not to
+be irritated by a mistress of millions, or whatever they were, who, as
+a girl, so easily might have been, like herself, only vague and fatally
+female. She was by no means sure of liking Aunt Maud as much as she
+deserved, and Aunt Maud's command of funds was obviously inferior to
+Milly's. There was thus clearly, as pleading for the latter, some
+influence that would later on become distinct; and meanwhile,
+decidedly, it was enough that she was as charming as she was queer and
+as queer as she was charming--all of which was a rare amusement; as
+well, for that matter, as further sufficient that there were objects of
+value she had already pressed on Kate's acceptance. A week of her
+society in these conditions--conditions that Milly chose to sum up as
+ministering immensely, for a blind, vague pilgrim, to aid and
+comfort--announced itself from an early hour as likely to become a week
+of presents, acknowledgments, mementos, pledges of gratitude and
+admiration that were all on one side. Kate as promptly embraced the
+propriety of making it clear that she must forswear shops till she
+should receive some guarantee that the contents of each one she entered
+as a humble companion should not be placed at her feet; yet that was in
+truth not before she had found herself in possession, under whatever
+protests, of several precious ornaments and other minor conveniences.
+
+Great was the absurdity, too, that there should have come a day, by the
+end of the week, when it appeared that all Milly would have asked in
+definite "return," as might be said, was to be told a little about Lord
+Mark and to be promised the privilege of a visit to Mrs. Condrip. Far
+other amusements had been offered her, but her eagerness was
+shamelessly human, and she seemed really to count more on the
+revelation of the anxious lady of Chelsea than on the best nights of
+the opera. Kate admired, and showed it, such an absence of fear: to the
+fear of being bored, in such a connection, she would have been so
+obviously entitled. Milly's answer to this was the plea of her
+curiosities--which left her friend wondering as to their odd direction.
+Some among them, no doubt, were rather more intelligible, and Kate had
+heard without wonder that she was blank about Lord Mark. This young
+lady's account of him, at the same time, professed itself as frankly
+imperfect; for what they best knew him by at Lancaster Gate was a thing
+difficult to explain. One knew people in general by something they had
+to show, something that, either for them or against, could be touched
+or named or proved; and she could think of no other case of a value
+taken as so great and yet flourishing untested. His value was his
+future, which had somehow got itself as accepted by Aunt Maud as if it
+had been his good cook or his steam-launch. She, Kate, didn't mean she
+thought him a humbug; he might do great things--but they were all, as
+yet, so to speak, he had done. On the other hand it was of course
+something of an achievement, and not open to every one, to have got
+one's self taken so seriously by Aunt Maud. The best thing about him,
+doubtless, on the whole, was that Aunt Maud believed in him. She was
+often fantastic, but she knew a humbug, and--no, Lord Mark wasn't that.
+He had been a short time in the House, on the Tory side, but had lost
+his seat on the first opportunity, and this was all he had to point to.
+However, he pointed to nothing; which was very possibly just a sign of
+his real cleverness, one of those that the really clever had in common
+with the really void. Even Aunt Maud frequently admitted that there was
+a good deal, for her view of him, to come up in the rear. And he wasn't
+meanwhile himself indifferent--indifferent to himself--for he was
+working Lancaster Gate for all it was worth: just as it was, no doubt,
+working _him,_ and just as the working and the worked were in London,
+as one might explain, the parties to every relation.
+
+Kate did explain, for her listening friend: every one who had anything
+to give--it was true they were the fewest--made the sharpest possible
+bargain for it, got at least its value in return. The strangest thing,
+furthermore, was that this might be, in cases, a happy understanding.
+The worker in one connection was the worked in another; it was as broad
+as it was long--with the wheels of the system, as might be seen,
+wonderfully oiled. People could quite like each other in the midst of
+it, as Aunt Maud, by every appearance, quite liked Lord Mark, and as
+Lord Mark, it was to be hoped, liked Mrs. Lowder, since if he didn't he
+was a greater brute than one could believe. She, Kate, had not yet, it
+was true, made out what he was doing for her--besides which the dear
+woman needed him, even at the most he could do, much less than she
+imagined; so far as all of which went, moreover, there were plenty of
+things on every side she had not yet made out. She believed, on the
+whole, in any one Aunt Maud took up; and she gave it to Milly as worth
+thinking of that, whatever wonderful people this young lady might meet
+in the land, she would meet no more extraordinary woman. There were
+greater celebrities by the million, and of course greater swells, but a
+bigger _person,_ by Kate's view, and a larger natural handful every
+way, would really be far to seek. When Milly inquired with interest if
+Kate's belief in _her_ was primarily on the lines of what Mrs. Lowder
+"took up," her interlocutress could handsomely say yes, since by the
+same principle she believed in herself. Whom but Aunt Maud's niece,
+pre-eminently, had Aunt Maud taken up, and who was thus more in the
+current, with her, of working and of being worked? "You may ask," Kate
+said, "what in the world I have to give; and that indeed is just what
+I'm trying to learn. There must be something, for her to think she can
+get it out of me. She _will_ get it--trust her; and then I shall see
+what it is; which I beg you to believe I should never have found out
+for myself." She declined to treat any question of Milly's own "paying"
+power as discussable; that Milly would pay a hundred per cent.--and
+even to the end, doubtless, through the nose--was just the beautiful
+basis on which they found themselves.
+
+These were fine facilities, pleasantries, ironies, all these luxuries
+of gossip and philosophies of London and of life, and they became
+quickly, between the pair, the common form of talk, Milly professing
+herself delighted to know that something was to be done with her. If
+the most remarkable woman in England was to do it, so much the better,
+and if the most remarkable woman in England had them both in hand
+together, why, what could be jollier for each? When she reflected
+indeed a little on the oddity of her wanting two at once, Kate had the
+natural reply that it was exactly what showed her sincerity. She
+invariably gave way to feeling, and feeling had distinctly popped up in
+her on the advent of her girlhood's friend. The way the cat would jump
+was always, in presence of anything that moved her, interesting to see;
+visibly enough, moreover, for a long time, it hadn't jumped anything
+like so far. This, in fact, as we already know, remained the marvel for
+Milly Theale, who, on sight of Mrs. Lowder, found fifty links in
+respect to Susie absent from the chain of association. She knew so
+herself what she thought of Susie that she would have expected the lady
+of Lancaster Gate to think something quite different; the failure of
+which endlessly mystified her. But her mystification was the cause for
+her of another fine impression, inasmuch as when she went so far as to
+observe to Kate that Susan Shepherd--and especially Susan Shepherd
+emerging so uninvited from an irrelevant past--ought, by all the
+proprieties, simply to have bored Aunt Maud, her confidant agreed with
+her without a protest and abounded in the sense of her wonder. Susan
+Shepherd at least bored the niece--that was plain; this young woman saw
+nothing in her--nothing to account for anything, not even for Milly's
+own indulgence: which little fact became in turn to the latter's mind a
+fact of significance. It was a light on the handsome girl--representing
+more than merely showed--that poor Susie was simply as nought to her.
+This was, in a manner too, a general admonition to poor Susie's
+companion, who seemed to see marked by it the direction in which she
+had best most look out.
+
+It just faintly rankled in her that a person who was good enough and to
+spare for Milly Theale shouldn't be good enough for another girl;
+though, oddly enough, she could easily have forgiven Mrs. Lowder
+herself the impatience. Mrs. Lowder didn't feel it, and Kate Croy felt
+it with ease; yet in the end, be it added, she grasped the reason, and
+the reason enriched her mind. Wasn't it sufficiently the reason that
+the handsome girl was, with twenty other splendid qualities, the least
+bit brutal too, and didn't she suggest, as no one yet had ever done for
+her new friend, that there might be a wild beauty in that, and even a
+strange grace? Kate wasn't brutally brutal--which Milly had hitherto
+benightedly supposed the only way; she wasn't even aggressively so, but
+rather indifferently, defensively and, as might be said, by the habit
+of anticipation. She simplified in advance, was beforehand with her
+doubts, and knew with singular quickness what she wasn't, as they said
+in New York, going to like. In that way at least people were clearly
+quicker in England than at home; and Milly could quite see, after a
+little, how such instincts might become usual in a world in which
+dangers abounded. There were more dangers, clearly, round about
+Lancaster Gate than one suspected in New York or could dream of in
+Boston. At all events, with more sense of them, there were more
+precautions, and it was a remarkable world altogether in which there
+could be precautions, on whatever ground, against Susie.
+
+
+IX
+
+She certainly made up with Susie directly, however, for any allowance
+she might have had privately to extend to tepid appreciation; since the
+late and long talks of these two embraced not only everything offered
+and suggested by the hours they spent apart, but a good deal more
+besides. She might be as detached as the occasion required at four
+o'clock in the afternoon, but she used no such freedom to any one about
+anything as she habitually used about everything to Susan Shepherd at
+midnight. All the same, it should with much less delay than this have
+been mentioned, she had not yet--had not, that is, at the end of six
+days--produced any news for her comrade to compare with an announcement
+made her by the latter as a result of a drive with Mrs. Lowder, for a
+change, in the remarkable Battersea Park. The elder friends had
+sociably revolved there while the younger ones followed bolder fancies
+in the admirable equipage appointed to Milly at the hotel--a heavier,
+more emblazoned, more amusing chariot than she had ever, with "stables"
+notoriously mismanaged, known at home; whereby, in the course of the
+circuit, more than once repeated, it had "come out," as Mrs. Stringham
+said, that the couple at Lancaster Gate were, of all people, acquainted
+with Mildred's other English friend--the gentleman, the one connected
+with the English newspaper (Susie hung fire a little over his name) who
+had been with her in New York so shortly previous to present
+adventures. He had been named of course in Battersea Park--else he
+couldn't have been identified; and Susie had naturally, before she
+could produce her own share in the matter as a kind of confession, to
+make it plain that her allusion was to Mr. Merton Densher. This was
+because Milly had at first a little air of not knowing whom she meant;
+and the girl really kept, as well, a certain control of herself while
+she remarked that the case was surprising, the chance one in a
+thousand. They knew him, both Maud and Miss Croy knew him, she gathered
+too, rather well, though indeed it was not on any show of intimacy that
+he had happened to be mentioned. It had not been--Susie made the
+point--she herself who brought him in: he had in fact not been brought
+in at all, but only referred to as a young journalist known to Mrs.
+Lowder and who had lately gone to their wonderful country--Mrs. Lowder
+always said "your wonderful country"--on behalf of his journal. But
+Mrs. Stringham had taken it up--with the tips of her fingers indeed;
+and that was the confession: she had, without meaning any harm,
+recognised Mr. Densher as an acquaintance of Milly's, though she had
+also pulled herself up before getting in too far. Mrs. Lowder had been
+struck, clearly--it wasn't too much to say; then she also, it had
+rather seemed, had pulled herself up; and there had been a little
+moment during which each might have been keeping something from the
+other. "Only," said Milly's mate, "I luckily remembered in time that I
+had nothing whatever to keep--which was much simpler and nicer. I don't
+know what Maud has, but there it is. She was interested, distinctly, in
+your knowing him--in his having met you over there with so little loss
+of time. But I ventured to tell her it hadn't been so long as to make
+you as yet great friends. I don't know if I was right."
+
+Whatever time this explanation might have taken, there had been moments
+enough in the matter now--before the elder woman's conscience had done
+itself justice--to enable Milly to reply that although the fact in
+question doubtless had its importance she imagined they wouldn't find
+the importance overwhelming. It _was_ odd that their one Englishman
+should so instantly fit; it wasn't, however, miraculous--they surely
+all had often seen that, as every one said, the world was
+extraordinarily "small." Undoubtedly, too, Susie had done just the
+plain thing in not letting his name pass. Why in the world should there
+be a mystery?--and what an immense one they would appear to have made
+if he should come back and find they had concealed their knowledge of
+him! "I don't know, Susie dear," the girl observed, "what you think I
+have to conceal."
+
+"It doesn't matter, at a given moment," Mrs. Stringham returned, "what
+you know or don't know as to what I think; for you always find out the
+very next moment, and when you do find out, dearest, you never _really_
+care. Only," she presently asked, "have you heard of him from Miss
+Croy?"
+
+"Heard of Mr. Densher? Never a word. We haven't mentioned him. Why
+should we?"
+
+"That _you_ haven't, I understand; but that she hasn't," Susie opined,
+"may mean something."
+
+"May mean what?"
+
+"Well," Mrs. Stringham presently brought out, "I tell you all when I
+tell you that Maud asks me to suggest to you that it may perhaps be
+better for the present not to speak of him: not to speak of him to her
+niece, that is, unless she herself speaks to you first. But Maud thinks
+she won't."
+
+Milly was ready to engage for anything; but in respect to the facts--as
+they so far possessed them--it all sounded a little complicated. "Is it
+because there's anything between them?"
+
+"No--I gather not; but Maud's state of mind is precautionary. She's
+afraid of something. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say she's
+afraid of everything."
+
+"She's afraid, you mean," Milly asked, "of their--a--liking each other?"
+
+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; and another
+person present at such times might have wondered to what inner thought
+of her own the good lady was trying to fit the speech. It was too much
+her disposition, no doubt, to treat her young companion's words as
+symptoms of an imputed malady. It was none the less, however, her
+highest law to be light when the girl was light. She knew how to be
+quaint with the new quaintness--the great Boston gift; it had been,
+happily, her note in the magazines; and Maud Lowder, to whom it was new
+indeed and who had never heard anything remotely like it, quite
+cherished her, as a social resource, for it. It should not therefore
+fail her now; with it in fact one might face most things. "Ah, then let
+us hope we shall sound the depths--I'm prepared for the worst--of
+sorrow and sin! But she would like her niece--we're not ignorant of
+that, are we?--to marry Lord Mark. Hasn't she told you so?"
+
+"Hasn't Mrs. Lowder told me?"
+
+"No; hasn't Kate? It isn't, you know, that she doesn't know it."
+
+Milly had, under her comrade's eyes, a minute of mute detachment. She
+had lived with Kate Croy for several days in a state of intimacy as
+deep as it had been sudden, and they had clearly, in talk, in many
+directions, proceeded to various extremities. Yet it now came over her
+as in a clear cold way that there was a possible account of their
+relations in which the quantity her new friend had told her might have
+figured as small, as smallest, beside the quantity she hadn't. She
+couldn't say, at any rate, whether or no she had made the point that
+her aunt designed her for Lord Mark: it had only sufficiently come
+out--which had been, moreover, eminently guessable--that she was
+involved in her aunt's designs. Somehow, for Milly, brush it over
+nervously as she might and with whatever simplifying hand, this abrupt
+extrusion of Mr. Densher altered all proportions, had an effect on all
+values. It was fantastic of her to let it make a difference that she
+couldn't in the least have defined--and she was at least, even during
+these instants, rather proud of being able to hide, on the spot, the
+difference it did make. Yet, all the same, the effect for her was,
+almost violently, of Mr. Densher's having been there--having been where
+she had stood till now in her simplicity--before her. It would have
+taken but another free moment to make her see abysses--since abysses
+were what she wanted--in the mere circumstance of his own silence, in
+New York, about his English friends. There had really been in New York
+little time for anything; but, had she liked, Milly could have made it
+out for herself that he had avoided the subject of Miss Croy, and that
+Miss Croy was yet a subject it could never be natural to avoid. It was
+to be added at the same time that even if his silence had been
+labyrinthe--which was absurd in view of all the other things too he
+couldn't possibly have spoken of--this was exactly what must suit her,
+since it fell under the head of the plea she had just uttered to Susie.
+These things, however, came and went, and it set itself up between the
+companions, for the occasion, in the oddest way, both that their
+happening all to know Mr. Densher--except indeed that Susie didn't, but
+probably would,--was a fact belonging, in a world of rushing about, to
+one of the common orders of chance; and yet further that it was
+amusing--oh, awfully amusing!--to be able fondly to hope that there was
+"something in" its having been left to crop up with such suddenness.
+There seemed somehow a possibility that the ground or, as it were, the
+air might, in a manner, have undergone some pleasing preparation;
+though the question of this possibility would probably, after all, have
+taken some threshing out. The truth, moreover--and there they were,
+already, our pair, talking about it, the "truth!"--had not in fact
+quite cropped out. This, obviously, in view of Mrs. Lowder's request to
+her old friend.
+
+It was accordingly on Mrs. Lowder's recommendation that nothing should
+be said to Kate--it was on this rich attitude of Aunt Maud's that the
+idea of an interesting complication might best hope to perch; and when,
+in fact, after the colloquy we have reported Milly saw Kate again
+without mentioning any name, her silence succeeded in passing muster
+with her as the beginning of a new sort of fun. The sort was all the
+newer by reason of its containing a small element of anxiety: when she
+had gone in for fun before it had been with her hands a little more
+free. Yet it _was,_ none the less, rather exciting to be conscious of a
+still sharper reason for interest in the handsome girl, as Kate
+continued, even now, pre-eminently to remain for her; and a
+reason--this was the great point--of which the young woman herself
+could have no suspicion. Twice over, thus, for two or three hours
+together, Milly found herself seeing Kate, quite fixing her in the
+light of the knowledge that it was a face on which Mr. Densher's eyes
+had more or less familiarly rested and which, by the same token, had
+looked, rather _more_ beautifully than less, into his own. She pulled
+herself up indeed with the thought that it had inevitably looked, as
+beautifully as one would, into thousands of faces in which one might
+one's self never trace it; but just the odd result of the thought was
+to intensify for the girl that side of her friend which she had
+doubtless already been more prepared than she quite knew to think of as
+the "other," the not wholly calculable. It was fantastic, and Milly was
+aware of this; but the other side was what had, of a sudden, been
+turned straight towards her by the show of Mr. Densher's propinquity.
+She hadn't the excuse of knowing it for Kate's own, since nothing
+whatever as yet proved it particularly to be such. Never mind; it was
+with this other side now fully presented that Kate came and went,
+kissed her for greeting and for parting, talked, as usual, of
+everything but--as it had so abruptly become for Milly--_the_ thing.
+Our young woman, it is true, would doubtless not have tasted so sharply
+a difference in this pair of occasions had she not been tasting so
+peculiarly her own possible betrayals. What happened was that
+afterwards, on separation, she wondered if the matter had not mainly
+been that she herself was so "other," so taken up with the unspoken;
+the strangest thing of all being, still subsequently, that when she
+asked herself how Kate could have failed to feel it she became
+conscious of being here on the edge of a great darkness. She should
+never know how Kate truly felt about anything such a one as Milly
+Theale should give her to feel. Kate would never--and not from
+ill-will, nor from duplicity, but from a sort of failure of common
+terms--reduce it to such a one's comprehension or put it within her
+convenience.
+
+It was as such a one, therefore, that, for three or four days more,
+Milly watched Kate as just such another; and it was presently as such a
+one that she threw herself into their promised visit, at last achieved,
+to Chelsea, the quarter of the famous Carlyle, the field of exercise of
+his ghost, his votaries, and the residence of "poor Marian," so often
+referred to and actually a somewhat incongruous spirit there. With our
+young woman's first view of poor Marian everything gave way but the
+sense of how, in England, apparently, the social situation of sisters
+could be opposed, how common ground, for a place in the world, could
+quite fail them: a state of things sagely perceived to be involved in
+an hierarchical, an aristocratic order. Just whereabouts in the order
+Mrs. Lowder had established her niece was a question not wholly void,
+as yet, no doubt, of ambiguity--though Milly was withal sure Lord Mark
+could exactly have fixed the point if he would, fixing it at the same
+time for Aunt Maud herself; but it was clear that Mrs. Condrip was, as
+might have been said, in quite another geography. She would not, in
+short, have been to be found on the same social map, and it was as if
+her visitors had turned over page after page together before the final
+relief of their benevolent "Here!" The interval was bridged, of course,
+but the bridge, verily, was needed, and the impression left Milly to
+wonder whether, in the general connection, it were of bridges or of
+intervals that the spirit not locally disciplined would find itself
+most conscious. It was as if at home, by contrast, there were
+neither--neither the difference itself, from position to position, nor,
+on either side, and particularly on one, the awfully good manner, the
+conscious sinking of a consciousness, that made up for it. The
+conscious sinking, at all events, and the awfully good manner, the
+difference, the bridge, the interval, the skipped leaves of the social
+atlas--these, it was to be confessed, had a little, for our young lady,
+in default of stouter stuff, to work themselves into the light literary
+legend--a mixed, wandering echo of Trollope, of Thackeray, perhaps
+mostly of Dickens--under favour of which her pilgrimage had so much
+appealed. She could relate to Susie later on, late the same evening,
+that the legend, before she had done with it, had run clear, that the
+adored author of _The Newcomes_, in fine, had been on the whole the
+note: the picture lacking thus more than she had hoped, or rather
+perhaps showing less than she had feared, a certain possibility of
+Pickwickian outline. She explained how she meant by this that Mrs.
+Condrip had not altogether proved another Mrs. Nickleby, nor even--for
+she might have proved almost anything, from the way poor worried Kate
+had spoken--a widowed and aggravated Mrs. Micawber.
+
+Mrs. Stringham, in the midnight conference, intimated rather yearningly
+that, however the event might have turned, the side of English life
+such experiences opened to Milly were just those she herself seemed
+"booked"--as they were all, roundabout her now, always saying--to miss:
+she had begun to have a little, for her fellow-observer, these moments
+of fanciful reaction--reaction in which she was once more all Susan
+Shepherd--against the high sphere of colder conventions into which her
+overwhelming connection with Maud Manningham had rapt her. Milly never
+lost sight, for long, of the Susan Shepherd side of her, and was always
+there to meet it when it came up and vaguely, tenderly, impatiently to
+pat it, abounding in the assurance that they would still provide for
+it. They had, however, to-night, another matter in hand; which proved
+to be presently, on the girl's part, in respect to her hour of Chelsea,
+the revelation that Mrs. Condrip, taking a few minutes when Kate was
+away with one of the children, in bed upstairs for some small
+complaint, had suddenly, without its being in the least "led up to,"
+broken ground on the subject of Mr. Densher, mentioned him with
+impatience as a person in love with her sister. "She wished me, if I
+cared for Kate, to know," Milly said--"for it would be quite too
+dreadful, and one might do something."
+
+Susie wondered. "Prevent anything coming of it? That's easily said. Do
+what?"
+
+Milly had a dim smile. "I think that what she would like is that I
+should come a good deal to see her about it."
+
+"And doesn't she suppose you've anything else to do?"
+
+The girl had by this time clearly made it out. "Nothing but to admire
+and make much of her sister--whom she doesn't, however, herself in the
+least understand--and give up one's time, and everything else, to it."
+It struck the elder friend that she spoke with an almost unprecedented
+approach to sharpness; as if Mrs. Condrip had been rather specially
+disconcerting. Never yet so much as just of late had Mrs. Stringham
+seen her companion as exalted, and by the very play of something
+within, into a vague golden air that left irritation below. That was
+the great thing with Milly--it was her characteristic poetry; or at
+least it was Susan Shepherd's. "But she made a point," the former
+continued, "of my keeping what she says from Kate. I'm not to mention
+that she has spoken."
+
+"And why," Mrs. Stringham presently asked, "is Mr. Densher so dreadful?"
+
+Milly had, she thought, an hesitation--something that suggested a
+fuller talk with Mrs. Condrip than she inclined perhaps to report. "It
+isn't so much he himself." Then the girl spoke a little as for the
+romance of it; one could never tell, with her, where romance would come
+in. "It's the state of his fortunes."
+
+"And is that very bad?"
+
+"He has no 'private means,' and no prospect of any. He has no income,
+and no ability, according to Mrs. Condrip, to make one. He's as poor,
+she calls it, as 'poverty,' and she says she knows what that is."
+
+Again Mrs. Stringham considered, and it presently produced something.
+"But isn't he brilliantly clever?"
+
+Milly had also then an instant that was not quite fruitless. "I haven't
+the least idea."
+
+To which, for the time, Susie only answered "Oh!"--though by the end of
+a minute she had followed it with a slightly musing "I see"; and that
+in turn with: "It's quite what Maud Lowder thinks."
+
+"That he'll never do anything?"
+
+"No--quite the contrary: that he's exceptionally able."
+
+"Oh yes; I know"--Milly had again, in reference to what her friend had
+already told her of this, her little tone of a moment before. "But Mrs.
+Condrip's own great point is that Aunt Maud herself won't hear of any
+such person. Mr. Densher, she holds that's the way, at any rate, it was
+explained to me--won't ever be either a public man or a rich man. If he
+were public she'd be willing, as I understand, to help him; if he were
+rich--without being anything else--she'd do her best to swallow him. As
+it is, she taboos him."
+
+"In short," said Mrs. Stringham as with a private purpose, "she told
+you, the sister, all about it. But Mrs. Lowder likes him," she added.
+
+"Mrs. Condrip didn't tell me that."
+
+"Well, she does, all the same, my dear, extremely."
+
+"Then there it is!" On which, with a drop and one of those sudden,
+slightly sighing surrenders to a vague reflux and a general fatigue
+that had recently more than once marked themselves for her companion,
+Milly turned away. Yet the matter was not left so, that night, between
+them, albeit neither perhaps could afterwards have said which had first
+come back to it. Milly's own nearest approach, at least, for a little,
+to doing so, was to remark that they appeared all--every one they
+saw--to think tremendously of money. This prompted in Susie a laugh,
+not untender, the innocent meaning of which was that it came, as a
+subject for indifference, money did, easier to some people than to
+others: she made the point in fairness, however, that you couldn't have
+told, by any too crude transparency of air, what place it held for Maud
+Manningham. She did her worldliness with grand proper silences--if it
+mightn't better be put perhaps that she did her detachment with grand
+occasional pushes. However Susie put it, in truth, she was really, in
+justice to herself, thinking of the difference, as favourites of
+fortune, between her old friend and her new. Aunt Maud sat somehow in
+the midst of her money, founded on it and surrounded by it, even if
+with a clever high manner about it, her manner of looking, hard and
+bright, as if it weren't there. Milly, about hers, had no manner at
+all--which was possibly, from a point of view, a fault: she was at any
+rate far away on the edge of it, and you hadn't, as might be said, in
+order to get at her nature, to traverse, by whatever avenue, any piece
+of her property. It was clear, on the other hand, that Mrs. Lowder was
+keeping her wealth as for purposes, imaginations, ambitions, that would
+figure as large, as honourably unselfish, on the day they should take
+effect. She would impose her will, but her will would be only that a
+person or two shouldn't lose a benefit by not submitting if they could
+be made to submit. To Milly, as so much younger, such far views
+couldn't be imputed: there was nobody she was supposable as interested
+for. It was too soon, since she wasn't interested for herself. Even the
+richest woman, at her age, lacked motive, and Milly's motive doubtless
+had plenty of time to arrive. She was meanwhile beautiful, simple,
+sublime without it--whether missing it and vaguely reaching out for it
+or not; and with it, for that matter, in the event, would really be
+these things just as much. Only then she might very well have, like
+Aunt Maud, a manner. Such were the connections, at all events, in which
+the colloquy of our two ladies freshly flickered up--in which it came
+round that the elder asked the younger if she had herself, in the
+afternoon, named Mr. Densher as an acquaintance.
+
+"Oh no--I said nothing of having seen him. I remembered," the girl
+explained, "Mrs. Lowder's wish."
+
+"But that," her friend observed after a moment, "was for silence to
+Kate."
+
+"Yes--but Mrs. Condrip would immediately have told Kate."
+
+"Why so?--since she must dislike to talk about him."
+
+"Mrs. Condrip must?" Milly thought. "What she would like most is that
+her sister should be brought to think ill of him; and if anything she
+can tell her will help that--" But Milly dropped suddenly here, as if
+her companion would see.
+
+Her companion's interest, however, was all for what she herself saw.
+"You mean she'll immediately speak?" Mrs. Stringham gathered that this
+was what Milly meant, but it left still a question. "How will it be
+against him that you know him?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. It won't be so much one's knowing him as one's
+having kept it out of sight."
+
+"Ah," said Mrs. Stringham, as if for comfort, _"you_ haven't kept it
+out of sight. Isn't it much rather Miss Croy herself who has?"
+
+"It isn't my acquaintance with him," Milly smiled, "that she has
+dissimulated."
+
+"She has dissimulated only her own? Well then, the responsibility's
+hers."
+
+"Ah but," said the girl, not perhaps with marked consequence, "she has
+a right to do as she likes."
+
+"Then so, my dear, have you!" smiled Susan Shepherd.
+
+Milly looked at her as if she were almost venerably simple, but also as
+if this were what one loved her for. "We're not quarrelling about it,
+Kate and I, _yet."_
+
+"I only meant," Mrs. Stringham explained, "that I don't see what Mrs.
+Condrip would gain."
+
+"By her being able to tell Kate?" Milly thought. "I only meant that I
+don't see what I myself should gain."
+
+"But it will have to come out--that he knows you both--some time."
+
+Milly scarce assented. "Do you mean when he comes back?"
+
+"He'll find you both here, and he can hardly be looked to, I take it,
+to 'cut' either of you for the sake of the other."
+
+This placed the question at last on a basis more distinctly cheerful.
+"I might get at him somehow beforehand," the girl suggested; "I might
+give him what they call here the tip--that he's not to know me when we
+meet. Or, better still, I mightn't be here at all."
+
+"Do you want to run away from him?"
+
+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. The sense
+was constant for her that their relation was as if afloat, like some
+island of the south, in a great warm sea that made, for every
+conceivable chance, a margin, an outer sphere of general emotion; and
+the effect of the occurrence of anything in particular was to make the
+sea submerge the island, the margin flood the text. The great wave now
+for a moment swept over. "I'll go anywhere else in the world you like."
+
+But Milly came up through it. "Dear old Susie--how I do work you!"
+
+"Oh, this is nothing yet."
+
+"No indeed--to what it will be."
+
+"You're not--and it's vain to pretend," said dear old Susie, who had
+been taking her in, "as sound and strong as I insist on having you."
+
+"Insist, insist--the more the better. But the day I _look_ as sound and
+strong as that, you know," Milly went on--"on that day I shall be just
+sound and strong enough to take leave of you sweetly for ever. That's
+where one is," she continued thus agreeably to embroider, "when even
+one's _most_ 'beaux moments' aren't such as to qualify, so far as
+appearance goes, for anything gayer than a handsome cemetery. Since
+I've lived all these years as if I were dead, I shall die, no doubt, as
+if I were alive--which will happen to be as you want me. So, you see,"
+she wound up, "you'll never really know where I am. Except indeed when
+I'm gone; and then you'll only know where I'm not."
+
+"I'd die _for_ you," said Susan Shepherd after a moment.
+
+"'Thanks awfully'! Then stay here for me."
+
+"But we can't be in London for August, nor for many of all these next
+weeks."
+
+"Then we'll go back."
+
+Susie blenched. "Back to America?"
+
+"No, abroad--to Switzerland, Italy, anywhere. I mean by your staying
+here for me," Milly pursued, "your staying with me wherever I may be,
+even though we may neither of us know at the time where it is. No," she
+insisted, "I _don't_ know where I am, and you never will, and it
+doesn't matter--and I dare say it's quite true," she broke off, "that
+everything will have to come out." Her friend would have felt of her
+that she joked about it now, had not her scale from grave to gay been a
+thing of such unnamable shades that her contrasts were never sharp. She
+made up for failures of gravity by failures of mirth; if she hadn't,
+that is, been at times as earnest as might have been liked, so she was
+certain not to be at other times as easy as she would like herself. "I
+must face the music. It isn't, at any rate, its 'coming out,'" she
+added; "it's that Mrs. Condrip would put the fact before her to his
+injury."
+
+Her companion wondered. "But how to _his?"_
+
+"Why, if he pretends to love her----!"
+
+"And does he only 'pretend'?"
+
+"I mean if, trusted by her in strange countries, he forgets her so far
+as to make up to other people."
+
+The amendment, however, brought Susie in, as if with gaiety, for a
+comfortable end. "Did he make up, the false creature, to _you?"_
+
+"No--but the question isn't of that. It's of what Kate might be made to
+believe."
+
+"That, given the fact that he evidently more or less followed up his
+acquaintance with you, to say nothing of your obvious weird charm, he
+must have been all ready if you had at all led him on?"
+
+Milly neither accepted nor qualified this; she only said, after a
+moment, as with a conscious excess of the pensive: "No, I don't think
+she'd quite wish to suggest that I made up to _him;_ for that I should
+have had to do so would only bring out his constancy. All I mean is,"
+she added--and now at last, as with a supreme impatience "that her
+being able to make him out a little a person who could give cause for
+jealousy would evidently help her, since she's afraid of him, to do him
+in her sister's mind a useful ill turn."
+
+Susan Shepherd perceived in this explanation such signs of an appetite
+for motive as would have sat gracefully even on one of her own New
+England heroines. It was seeing round several corners; but that was
+what New England heroines did, and it was moreover interesting for the
+moment to make out how many really her young friend had undertaken to
+see round. Finally, too, weren't they braving the deeps? They got their
+amusement where they could. "Isn't it only," she asked, "rather
+probable she'd see that Kate's knowing him as (what's the pretty old
+word?) _volage_----?"
+
+"Well?" She hadn't filled out her idea, but neither, it seemed, could
+Milly.
+
+"Well, might but do what that often does--by all _our_ blessed little
+laws and arrangements at least; excite Kate's own sentiment instead of
+depressing it."
+
+The idea was bright, yet the girl but beautifully stared. "Kate's own
+sentiment? Oh, she didn't speak of that. I don't think," she added as
+if she had been unconsciously giving a wrong impression, "I don't think
+Mrs. Condrip imagines _she's_ in love."
+
+It made Mrs. Stringham stare in turn. "Then what's her fear?"
+
+"Well, only the fact of Mr. Densher's possibly himself keeping it
+up--the fear of some final result from _that._
+
+"Oh," said Susie, intellectually a little disconcerted--"she looks far
+ahead!"
+
+At this, however, Milly threw off another of her sudden vague "sports."
+"No--it's only we who do."
+
+"Well, don't let us be more interested for them than they are for
+themselves!"
+
+"Certainly not"--the girl promptly assented. A certain interest
+nevertheless remained; she appeared to wish to be clear. "It wasn't of
+anything on Kate's own part she spoke."
+
+"You mean she thinks her sister does _not_ care for him?"
+
+It was still as if, for an instant, Milly had to be sure of what she
+meant; but there it presently was. "If she did care Mrs. Condrip would
+have told me."
+
+What Susan Shepherd seemed hereupon for a little to wonder was why then
+they had been talking so. "But did you ask her?"
+
+"Ah, no!"
+
+"Oh!" said Susan Shepherd.
+
+Milly, however, easily explained that she wouldn't have asked her for
+the world.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FIFTH
+
+X
+
+Lord Mark looked at her to-day in particular as if to wring from her a
+confession that she had originally done him injustice; and he was
+entitled to whatever there might be in it of advantage or merit that
+his intention really in a manner took effect: he cared about something,
+that is, after all, sufficiently to make her feel absurdly as if she
+_were_ confessing--all the while it was quite the case that neither
+justice nor injustice was what had been in question between them. He
+had presented himself at the hotel, had found her and had found Susan
+Shepherd at home, had been "civil" to Susan--it was just that shade,
+and Susan's fancy had fondly caught it; and then had come again and
+missed them, and then had come and found them once more: besides
+letting them easily see that if it hadn't by this time been the end of
+everything--which they could feel in the exhausted air, that of the
+season at its last gasp--the places they might have liked to go to were
+such as they would have had only to mention. Their feeling was--or at
+any rate their modest general plea--that there was no place they would
+have liked to go to; there was only the sense of finding they liked,
+wherever they were, the place to which they had been brought. Such was
+highly the case as to their current consciousness--which could be
+indeed, in an equally eminent degree, but a matter of course;
+impressions this afternoon having by a happy turn of their wheel been
+gathered for them into a splendid cluster, an offering like an armful
+of the rarest flowers. They were in presence of the offering--they had
+been led up to it; and if it had been still their habit to look at each
+other across distances for increase of unanimity his hand would have
+been silently named between them as the hand applied to the wheel. He
+had administered the touch that, under light analysis, made the
+difference--the difference of their not having lost, as Susie on the
+spot and at the hour phrased it again and again, both for herself and
+for such others as the question might concern, so beautiful and
+interesting an experience; the difference also, in fact, of Mrs.
+Lowder's not having lost it either, though it was with Mrs. Lowder,
+superficially, they had come, and though it was further with that lady
+that our young woman was directly engaged during the half-hour or so of
+her most agreeably inward response to the scene.
+
+The great historic house had, for Milly, beyond terrace and garden, as
+the centre of an almost extravagantly grand Watteau-composition, a tone
+as of old gold kept "down" by the quality of the air, summer
+full-flushed, but attuned to the general perfect taste. Much, by her
+measure, for the previous hour, appeared, in connection with this
+revelation of it, to have happened to her--a quantity expressed in
+introductions of charming new people, in walks through halls of armour,
+of pictures, of cabinets, of tapestry, of tea-tables, in an assault of
+reminders that this largeness of style was the sign of _appointed_
+felicity. The largeness of style was the great containing vessel, while
+everything else, the pleasant personal affluence, the easy, murmurous
+welcome, the honoured age of illustrious host and hostess, all at once
+so distinguished and so plain, so public and so shy, became but this or
+that element of the infusion. The elements melted together and seasoned
+the draught, the essence of which might have struck the girl as
+distilled into the small cup of iced coffee she had vaguely accepted
+from somebody, while a fuller flood, somehow, kept bearing her up--all
+the freshness of response of her young life the freshness of the first
+and only prime. What had perhaps brought on just now a kind of climax
+was the fact of her appearing to make out, through Aunt Maud, what was
+really the matter. It couldn't be less than a climax for a poor shaky
+maiden to find it put to her of a sudden that she herself was the
+matter--for that was positively what, on Mrs. Lowder's part, it came
+to. Everything was great, of course, in great pictures, and it was
+doubtless precisely a part of the brilliant life--since the brilliant
+life, as one had faintly figured it, clearly _was_ humanly led--that
+all impressions within its area partook of its brilliancy; still,
+letting that pass, it fairly stamped an hour as with the official seal
+for one to be able to take in so comfortably one's companion's broad
+blandness. "You must stay among us--you must stay; anything else is
+impossible and ridiculous; you don't know yet, no doubt--you can't; but
+you will soon enough: you can stay in _any_ position." It had been as
+the murmurous consecration to follow the murmurous welcome; and even if
+it were but part of Aunt Maud's own spiritual ebriety--for the dear
+woman, one could see, was spiritually "keeping" the day--it served to
+Milly, then and afterwards, as a high-water mark of the imagination.
+
+It was to be the end of the short parenthesis which had begun but the
+other day at Lancaster Gate with Lord Mark's informing her that she was
+a "success"--the key thus again struck; and though no distinct, no
+numbered revelations had crowded in, there had, as we have seen, been
+plenty of incident for the space and the time. There had been thrice as
+much, and all gratuitous and genial--if, in portions, not exactly
+hitherto _the_ revelation--as three unprepared weeks could have been
+expected to produce. Mrs. Lowder had improvised a "rush" for them, but
+out of elements, as Milly was now a little more freely aware, somewhat
+roughly combined. Therefore if at this very instant she had her reasons
+for thinking of the parenthesis as about to close--reasons completely
+personal--she had on behalf of her companion a divination almost as
+deep. The parenthesis would close with this admirable picture, but the
+admirable picture still would show Aunt Maud as not absolutely sure
+either if she herself were destined to remain in it. What she was
+doing, Milly might even not have escaped seeming to see, was to talk
+herself into a sublimer serenity while she ostensibly talked Milly. It
+was fine, the girl fully felt, the way she did talk _her,_ little as,
+at bottom, our young woman needed it or found other persuasions at
+fault. It was in particular during the minutes of her grateful
+absorption of iced coffee--qualified by a sharp doubt of her
+wisdom--that she most had in view Lord Mark's relation to her being
+there, or at least to the question of her being amused at it. It
+wouldn't have taken much by the end of five minutes quite to make her
+feel that this relation was charming. It might, once more, simply have
+been that everything, anything, was charming when one was so justly and
+completely charmed; but, frankly, she had not supposed anything so
+serenely sociable could define itself between them as the friendly
+understanding that was at present somehow in the air. They were, many
+of them together, near the marquee that had been erected on a stretch
+of sward as a temple of refreshment and that happened to have the
+property--which was all to the good of making Milly think of a
+"durbar"; her iced coffee had been a consequence of this connection, in
+which, further, the bright company scattered about fell thoroughly into
+place. Certain of its members might have represented the contingent of
+"native princes"--familiar, but scarce the less grandly gregarious
+term!--and Lord Mark would have done for one of these even though for
+choice he but presented himself as a supervisory friend of the family.
+The Lancaster Gate family, he clearly intended, in which he included
+its American recruits, and included above all Kate Croy--a young person
+blessedly easy to take care of. She knew people, and people knew her,
+and she was the handsomest thing there--this last a declaration made by
+Milly, in a sort of soft mid-summer madness, a straight skylark-flight
+of charity, to Aunt Maud.
+
+Kate had, for her new friend's eyes, the extraordinary and attaching
+property of appearing at a given moment to show as a beautiful
+stranger, to cut her connections and lose her identity, letting the
+imagination for the time make what it would of them--make her merely a
+person striking from afar, more and more pleasing as one watched, but
+who was above all a subject for curiosity. Nothing could have given
+her, as a party to a relation, a greater freshness than this
+sense--which sprang up at its own hours--of being as curious about her
+as if one hadn't known her. It had sprung up, we have gathered, as soon
+as Milly had seen her after hearing from Mrs. Stringham of her
+knowledge of Merton Densher; she had _looked_ then other and, as Milly
+knew the real critical mind would call it, more objective; and our
+young woman had foreseen it of her, on the spot, that she would often
+look so again. It was exactly what she was doing this afternoon; and
+Milly, who had amusements of thought that were like the secrecies of a
+little girl playing with dolls when conventionally "too big," could
+almost settle to the game of what one would suppose her, how one would
+place her, if one didn't know her. She became thus, intermittently, a
+figure conditioned only by the great facts of aspect, a figure to be
+waited for, named and fitted. This was doubtless but a way of feeling
+that it was of her essence to be peculiarly what the occasion, whatever
+it might be, demanded when its demand was highest. There were probably
+ways enough, on these lines, for such a consciousness; another of them
+would be, for instance, to say that she was made for great social uses.
+Milly was not wholly sure that she herself knew what great social uses
+might be--unless, as a good example, exerting just that sort of glamour
+in just that sort of frame were one of them: she would have fallen back
+on knowing sufficiently that they existed at all events for her friend.
+It imputed a primness, all round, to be reduced but to saying, by way
+of a translation of one's amusement, that she was always so
+_right_--since that, too often, was what the _insupportables_
+themselves were; yet it was, in overflow to Aunt Maud, what she had to
+content herself withal--save for the lame enhancement of saying she was
+lovely. It served, all the same, the purpose, strengthened the bond
+that for the time held the two ladies together, distilled in short its
+drop of rose-colour for Mrs. Lowder's own view. That was really the
+view Milly had, for most of the rest of the occasion, to give herself
+to immediately taking in; but it didn't prevent the continued play of
+those swift cross-lights, odd beguilements of the mind, at which we
+have already glanced.
+
+Mrs. Lowder herself found it enough simply to reply, in respect to
+Kate, that she was indeed a luxury to take about the world: she
+expressed no more surprise than that at her "rightness" to-day. Wasn't
+it by this time sufficiently manifest that it was precisely as the very
+luxury she was proving that she had, from far back, been appraised and
+waited for? Crude elation, however, might be kept at bay, and the
+circumstance none the less demonstrated that they were all swimming
+together in the blue. It came back to Lord Mark again, as he seemed
+slowly to pass and repass and conveniently to linger before them; he
+was personally the note of the blue--like a suspended skein of silk
+within reach of the broiderer's hand. Aunt Maud's free-moving shuttle
+took a length of him at rhythmic intervals; and one of the intermixed
+truths that flickered across to Milly was that he ever so consentingly
+knew he was being worked in. This was almost like an understanding with
+her at Mrs. Lowder's expense, which she would have none of; she
+wouldn't for the world have had him make any such point as that he
+wouldn't have launched them at Matcham--or whatever it was he _had_
+done--only for Aunt Maud's _beaux yeux._ What he had done, it would
+have been guessable, was something he had for some time been desired in
+vain to do; and what they were all now profiting by was a change
+comparatively sudden, the cessation of hope delayed. What had caused
+the cessation easily showed itself as none of Milly's business; and she
+was luckily, for that matter, in no real danger of hearing from him
+directly that her individual weight had been felt in the scale. Why
+then indeed was it an effect of his diffused but subdued participation
+that he might absolutely have been saying to her "Yes, let the dear
+woman take her own tone? Since she's here she may stay," he might have
+been adding--"for whatever she can make of it. But you and I are
+different." Milly knew _she_ was different in truth--his own difference
+was his own affair; but also she knew that, after all, even at their
+distinctest, Lord Mark's "tips" in this line would be tacit. He
+practically placed her--it came round again to that--under no
+obligation whatever. It was a matter of equal ease, moreover, her
+letting Mrs. Lowder take a tone. She might have taken twenty--they
+would have spoiled nothing.
+
+"You must stay on with us; you _can,_ you know, in any position you
+like; any, any, _any,_ my dear child"--and her emphasis went deep. "You
+must make your home with us; and it's really open to you to make the
+most beautiful one in the world. You mustn't be under a mistake--under
+any of any sort; and you must let us all think for you a little, take
+care of you and watch over you. Above all you must help me with Kate,
+and you must stay a little _for_ her; nothing for a long time has
+happened to me so good as that you and she should have become friends.
+It's beautiful; it's great; it's everything. What makes it perfect is
+that it should have come about through our dear delightful Susie,
+restored to me, after so many years, by such a miracle. No--that's more
+charming to me than even your hitting it off with Kate. God has been
+good to one--positively; for I couldn't, at my age, have made a new
+friend--undertaken, I mean, out of whole cloth, the real thing. It's
+like changing one's bankers--after fifty: one doesn't do that. That's
+why Susie has been kept for me, as you seem to keep people in your
+wonderful country, in lavender and pink paper--coming back at last as
+straight as out of a fairy-tale and with you as an attendant fairy."
+Milly hereupon replied appreciatively that such a description of
+herself made her feel as if pink paper were her dress and lavender its
+trimming; but Aunt Maud was not to be deterred by a weak joke from
+keeping it up. Her interlocutress could feel besides that she kept it
+up in perfect sincerity. She was somehow at this hour a very happy
+woman, and a part of her happiness might precisely have been that her
+affections and her views were moving as never before in concert.
+Unquestionably she loved Susie; but she also loved Kate and loved Lord
+Mark, loved their funny old host and hostess, loved every one within
+range, down to the very servant who came to receive Milly's empty
+iceplate--down, for that matter, to Milly herself, who was, while she
+talked, really conscious of the enveloping flap of a protective mantle,
+a shelter with the weight of an eastern carpet. An eastern carpet, for
+wishing-purposes of one's own, was a thing to be on rather than under;
+still, however, if the girl should fail of breath it wouldn't be, she
+could feel, by Mrs. Lowder's fault. One of the last things she was
+afterwards to recall of this was Aunt Maud's going on to say that she
+and Kate must stand together because together they could do anything.
+It was for Kate of course she was essentially planning; but the plan,
+enlarged and uplifted now, somehow required Milly's prosperity too for
+its full operation, just as Milly's prosperity at the same time
+involved Kate's. It was nebulous yet, it was slightly confused, but it
+was unmistakably free and genial, and it made our young woman
+understand things Kate had said of her aunt's possibilities as well as
+characterisations that had fallen from Susan Shepherd. One of the most
+frequent on the lips of the latter had been that dear Maud was a
+natural force.
+
+
+XI
+
+A prime reason, we must add, why sundry impressions were not to be
+fully present to the girl till later on was that they yielded at this
+stage, with an effect of sharp supersession, to a detached quarter of
+an hour--her only one--with Lord Mark. "Have you seen the picture in
+the house, the beautiful one that's so like you?"--he was asking that
+as he stood before her; having come up at last with his smooth
+intimation that any wire he had pulled and yet wanted not to remind her
+of wasn't quite a reason for his having no joy at all.
+
+"I've been through rooms and I've seen pictures. But if I'm 'like'
+anything so beautiful as most of them seemed to me----!" It needed in
+short for Milly some evidence, which he only wanted to supply. She was
+the image of the wonderful Bronzino, which she must have a look at on
+every ground. He had thus called her off and led her away; the more
+easily that the house within was above all what had already drawn round
+her its mystic circle. Their progress, meanwhile, was not of the
+straightest; it was an advance, without haste, through innumerable
+natural pauses and soft concussions, determined for the most part by
+the appearance before them of ladies and gentlemen, singly, in couples,
+in groups, who brought them to a stand with an inveterate "I say,
+Mark." What they said she never quite made out; it was their all so
+domestically knowing him, and his knowing them, that mainly struck her,
+while her impression, for the rest, was but of fellow-strollers more
+vaguely afloat than themselves, supernumeraries mostly a little
+battered, whether as jaunty males or as ostensibly elegant women. They
+might have been moving a good deal by a momentum that had begun far
+back, but they were still brave and personable, still warranted for
+continuance as long again, and they gave her, in especial collectively,
+a sense of pleasant voices, pleasanter than those of actors, of
+friendly, empty words and kind, lingering eyes. The lingering eyes
+looked her over, the lingering eyes were what went, in almost confessed
+simplicity, with the pointless "I say, Mark "; and what was really most
+sensible of all was that, as a pleasant matter of course, if she didn't
+mind, he seemed to suggest their letting people, poor dear things, have
+the benefit of her.
+
+The odd part was that he made her herself believe, for amusement, in
+the benefit, measured by him in mere manner--for wonderful, of a truth,
+was, as a means of expression, his slightness of emphasis--that her
+present good-nature conferred. It was, as she could easily see, a mild
+common carnival of good-nature--a mass of London people together, of
+sorts and sorts, but who mainly knew each other and who, in their way,
+did, no doubt, confess to curiosity. It had gone round that she was
+there; questions about her would be passing; the easiest thing was to
+run the gauntlet with _him_--just as the easiest thing was in fact to
+trust him generally. Couldn't she know for herself, passively, how
+little harm they meant her?--to that extent that it made no difference
+whether or not he introduced them. The strangest thing of all for Milly
+was perhaps the uplifted assurance and indifference with which she
+could simply give back the particular bland stare that appeared in such
+cases to mark civilisation at its highest. It was so little her fault,
+this oddity of what had "gone round" about her, that to accept it
+without question might be as good a way as another of feeling life. It
+was inevitable to supply the probable description--that of the awfully
+rich young American who was so queer to behold, but nice, by all
+accounts, to know; and she had really but one instant of speculation as
+to fables or fantasies perchance originally launched. She asked herself
+once only if Susie could, inconceivably, have been blatant about her;
+for the question, on the spot, was really blown away for ever. She knew
+in fact on the spot and with sharpness just why she had "elected" Susan
+Shepherd: she had had from the first hour the conviction of her being
+precisely the person in the world least possibly a trumpeter. So it
+wasn't their fault, it wasn't their fault, and anything might happen
+that would, and everything now again melted together, and kind eyes
+were always kind eyes--if it were never to be worse than that! She got
+with her companion into the house; they brushed, beneficently, past all
+their accidents. The Bronzino was, it appeared, deep within, and the
+long afternoon light lingered for them on patches of old colour and
+waylaid them, as they went, in nooks and opening vistas.
+
+It was all the while for Milly as if Lord Mark had really had something
+other than this spoken pretext in view; as if there were something he
+wanted to say to her and were only--consciously yet not awkwardly, just
+delicately--hanging fire. At the same time it was as if the thing had
+practically been said by the moment they came in sight of the picture;
+since what it appeared to amount to was "Do let a fellow who isn't a
+fool take care of you a little." The thing somehow, with the aid of the
+Bronzino, was done; it hadn't seemed to matter to her before if he were
+a fool or no; but now, just where they were, she liked his not being;
+and it was all moreover none the worse for coming back to something of
+the same sound as Mrs. Lowder's so recent reminder. She too wished to
+take care of her--and wasn't it, _à peu près_ what all the people with
+the kind eyes were wishing? Once more things melted together--the
+beauty and the history and the facility and the splendid midsummer
+glow: it was a sort of magnificent maximum, the pink dawn of an
+apotheosis, coming so curiously soon. What in fact befell was that, as
+she afterwards made out, it was Lord Mark who said nothing in
+particular--it was she herself who said all. She couldn't help that--it
+came; and the reason it came was that she found herself, for the first
+moment, looking at the mysterious portrait through tears. Perhaps it
+was her tears that made it just then so strange and fair--as wonderful
+as he had said: the face of a young woman, all magnificently drawn,
+down to the hands, and magnificently dressed; a face almost livid in
+hue, yet handsome in sadness and crowned with a mass of hair rolled
+back and high, that must, before fading with time, have had a family
+resemblance to her own. The lady in question, at all events, with her
+slightly Michaelangelesque squareness, her eyes of other days, her full
+lips, her long neck, her recorded jewels, her brocaded and wasted reds,
+was a very great personage--only unaccompanied by a joy. 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."
+
+He hadn't understood. She was before the picture, but she had turned to
+him, and she didn't care if, for the minute, he noticed her tears. It
+was probably as good a moment as she should ever have with him. It was
+perhaps as good a moment as she should have with any one, or have in
+any connection whatever. "I mean that everything this afternoon has
+been too beautiful, and that perhaps everything together will never be
+so right again. I'm very glad therefore you've been a part of it."
+
+Though he still didn't understand her he was as nice as if he had; he
+didn't ask for insistence, and that was just a part of his looking
+after her. He simply protected her now from herself, and there was a
+world of practice in it. "Oh, we must talk about these things!"
+
+Ah, they had already done that, she knew, as much as she ever would;
+and she was shaking her head at her pale sister the next moment with a
+world, on her side, of slowness. "I wish I could see the resemblance.
+Of course her complexion's green," she laughed; "but mine's several
+shades greener."
+
+"It's down to the very hands," said Lord Mark.
+
+"Her hands are large," Milly went on, "but mine are larger. Mine are
+huge."
+
+"Oh, you go her, all round, 'one better'--which is just what I said.
+But you're a pair. You must surely catch it," he added as if it were
+important to his character as a serious man not to appear to have
+invented his plea.
+
+"I don't know one never knows one's self. It's a funny fancy, and I
+don't imagine it would have occurred----"
+
+"I see it _has_ occurred"--he has already taken her up. She had her
+back, as she faced the picture, to one of the doors of the room, which
+was open, and on her turning, as he spoke, she saw that they were in
+the presence of three other persons, also, as appeared, interested
+inquirers. Kate Croy was one of these; Lord Mark had just become aware
+of her, and she, all arrested, had immediately seen, and made the best
+of it, that she was far from being first in the field. She had brought
+a lady and a gentleman to whom she wished to show what Lord Mark was
+showing Milly, and he took her straightway as a reinforcement. Kate
+herself had spoken, however, before he had had time to tell her so.
+
+_"You_ had noticed too?"--she smiled at him without looking at Milly.
+"Then I'm not original--which one always hopes one has been. But the
+likeness is so great." And now she looked at Milly--for whom again it
+was, all round indeed, kind, kind eyes. "Yes, there you are, my dear,
+if you want to know. And you're superb." She took now but a glance at
+the picture, though it was enough to make her question to her friends
+not too straight. "Isn't she superb?"
+
+"I brought Miss Theale," Lord Mark explained to the latter, "quite off
+my own bat."
+
+"I wanted Lady Aldershaw," Kate continued to Milly, "to see for
+herself."
+
+_"Les grands esprits se rencontrent!"_ laughed her attendant gentleman,
+a high, but slightly stooping, shambling and wavering person, who
+represented urbanity by the liberal aid of certain prominent front
+teeth and whom Milly vaguely took for some sort of great man.
+
+Lady Aldershaw meanwhile looked at Milly quite as if Milly had been the
+Bronzino and the Bronzino only Milly. "Superb, superb. Of course I had
+noticed you. It is wonderful," she went on with her back to the
+picture, but with some other eagerness which Milly felt gathering,
+directing her motions now. It was enough--they were introduced, and she
+was saying "I wonder if you could give us the pleasure of coming----"
+She was not fresh, for she was not young, even though she denied at
+every pore that she was old; but she was vivid and much bejewelled for
+the midsummer daylight; and she was all in the palest pinks and blues.
+She didn't think, at this pass, that she could "come" anywhere--Milly
+didn't; and she already knew that somehow Lord Mark was saving her from
+the question. He had interposed, taking the words out of the lady's
+mouth and not caring at all if the lady minded. That was clearly the
+right way to treat her--at least for him; as she had only dropped,
+smiling, and then turned away with him. She had been dealt with--it
+would have done an enemy good. The gentleman still stood, a little
+helpless, addressing himself to the intention of urbanity as if it were
+a large loud whistle; he had been signing sympathy, in his way, while
+the lady made her overture; and Milly had, in this light, soon arrived
+at their identity. They were Lord and Lady Aldershaw, and the wife was
+the clever one. A minute or two later the situation had changed, and
+she knew it afterwards to have been by the subtle operation of Kate.
+She was herself saying that she was afraid she must go now if Susie
+could be found; but she was sitting down on the nearest seat to say it.
+The prospect, through opened doors, stretched before her into other
+rooms, down the vista of which Lord Mark was strolling with Lady
+Aldershaw, who, close to him and much intent, seemed to show from
+behind as peculiarly expert. Lord Aldershaw, for his part, had been
+left in the middle of the room, while Kate, with her back to him, was
+standing before her with much sweetness of manner. The sweetness was
+all for _her;_ she had the sense of the poor gentleman's having somehow
+been handled as Lord Mark had handled his wife. He dangled there, he
+shambled a little; then he bethought himself of the Bronzino, before
+which, with his eyeglass, he hovered. It drew from him an odd, vague
+sound, not wholly distinct from a grunt, and a "Humph--most
+remarkable!" which lighted Kate's face with amusement. The next moment
+he had creaked away, over polished floors, after the others, and Milly
+was feeling as if _she_ had been rude. But Lord Aldershaw was in every
+way a detail, and Kate was saying to her that she hoped she wasn't ill.
+
+Thus it was that, aloft there in the great gilded historic chamber and
+the presence of the pale personage on the wall, whose eyes all the
+while seemed engaged with her own, she found herself suddenly sunk in
+something quite intimate and humble and to which these grandeurs were
+strange enough witnesses. It had come up, in the form in which she had
+had to accept it, all suddenly, and nothing about it, at the same time,
+was more marked than that she had in a manner plunged into it to escape
+from something else. Something else, from her first vision of her
+friend's appearance three minutes before, had been present to her even
+through the call made by the others on her attention; something that
+was perversely _there,_ she was more and more uncomfortably finding, at
+least for the first moments and by some spring of its own, with every
+renewal of their meeting. "Is it the way she looks to _him?"_ she asked
+herself--the perversity being that she kept in remembrance that Kate
+was known to him. It wasn't a fault in Kate--nor in him assuredly; and
+she had a horror, being generous and tender, of treating either of them
+as if it had been. To Densher himself she couldn't make it up--he was
+too far away; but her secondary impulse was to make it up to Kate. She
+did so now with a strange soft energy--the impulse immediately acting.
+"Will you render me to-morrow a great service?"
+
+"Any service, dear child, in the world."
+
+"But it's a secret one--nobody must know. I must be wicked and false
+about it."
+
+"Then I'm your woman," Kate smiled, "for that's the kind of thing I
+love. _Do_ let us do something bad. You're impossibly without sin, you
+know."
+
+Milly's eyes, on this, remained a little with their companion's. "Ah, I
+shan't perhaps come up to your idea. It's only to deceive Susan
+Shepherd."
+
+"Oh!" said Kate as if this were indeed mild.
+
+"But thoroughly--as thoroughly as I can."
+
+"And for cheating," Kate asked, "my powers will contribute? Well, I'll
+do my best for you." In accordance with which it was presently settled
+between them that Milly should have the aid and comfort of her presence
+for a visit to Sir Luke Strett. Kate had needed a minute for
+enlightenment, and it was quite grand for her comrade that this name
+should have said nothing to her. To Milly herself it had for some days
+been secretly saying much. The personage in question was, as she
+explained, the greatest of medical lights if she had got hold, as she
+believed (and she had used to this end the wisdom of the serpent) of
+the right, the special man. She had written to him three days before,
+and he had named her an hour, eleven-twenty; only it had come to her,
+on the eve, that she couldn't go alone. Her maid, on the other hand,
+wasn't good enough, and Susie was too good. Kate had listened, above
+all, with high indulgence. "And I'm betwixt and between, happy thought!
+Too good for what?"
+
+Milly thought. "Why, to be worried if it's nothing. And to be still
+more worried--I mean before she need be--if it isn't."
+
+Kate fixed her with deep eyes. "What in the world is the matter with
+you?" It had inevitably a sound of impatience, as if it had been a
+challenge really to produce something; so that Milly felt her for the
+moment only as a much older person, standing above her a little,
+doubting the imagined ailments, suspecting the easy complaints, of
+ignorant youth. It somewhat checked her, further, that the matter with
+her was what exactly as yet she wanted knowledge about; and she
+immediately declared, for conciliation, that if she were merely
+fanciful Kate would see her put to shame. Kate vividly uttered, in
+return, the hope that, since she could come out and be so charming,
+could so universally dazzle and interest, she wasn't all the while in
+distress or in anxiety--didn't believe herself, in short, to be in any
+degree seriously menaced. "Well, I want to make out--to make out!" was
+all that this consistently produced. To which Kate made clear answer:
+"Ah then, let us by all means!"
+
+"I thought," Milly said, "you would like to help me. But I must ask
+you, please, for the promise of absolute silence."
+
+"And how, if you _are_ ill, can your friends remain in ignorance?"
+
+"Well, if I am, it must of course finally come out. But I can go for a
+long time." Milly spoke with her eyes again on her painted
+sister's--almost as if under their suggestion. She still sat there
+before Kate, yet not without a light in her face. "That will be one of
+my advantages. I think I could die without its being noticed."
+
+"You're an extraordinary young woman," her friend, visibly held by her,
+declared at last. "What a remarkable time to talk of such things!"
+
+"Well, we won't talk, precisely"--Milly got herself together again. "I
+only wanted to make sure of you."
+
+"Here in the midst of----!" But Kate could only sigh for wonder--almost
+visibly too for pity.
+
+It made a moment during which her companion waited on her word; partly
+as if from a yearning, shy but deep, to have her case put to her just
+as Kate was struck by it; partly as if the hint of pity were already
+giving a sense to her whimsical "shot," with Lord Mark, at Mrs.
+Lowder's first dinner. Exactly this--the handsome girl's compassionate
+manner, her friendly descent from her own strength--was what she had
+then foretold. She took Kate up as if positively for the deeper taste
+of it. "Here in the midst of what?"
+
+"Of everything. There's nothing you can't have. There's nothing you
+can't do."
+
+"So Mrs. Lowder tells me."
+
+It just kept Kate's eyes fixed as possibly for more of that; then,
+however, without waiting, she went on. "We all adore you."
+
+"You're wonderful--you dear things!" Milly laughed.
+
+"No, it's _you."_ And Kate seemed struck with the real interest of it.
+"In three weeks!"
+
+Milly kept it up. "Never were people on such terms! All the more
+reason," she added, "that I shouldn't needlessly torment you."
+
+"But me? what becomes of _me?"_ said Kate.
+
+"Well, you--" Milly thought--"if there's anything to bear, you'll bear
+it."
+
+"But I _won't_ bear it!" said Kate Croy.
+
+"Oh yes, you will: all the same! You'll pity me awfully, but you'll
+help me very much. And I absolutely trust you. So there we are." There
+they were, then, since Kate had so to take it; but there, Milly felt,
+she herself in particular was; for it was just the point at which she
+had wished to arrive. She had wanted to prove to herself that she
+didn't horribly blame her friend for any reserve; and what better proof
+could there be than this quite special confidence? If she desired to
+show Kate that she really believed the latter liked her, how could she
+show it more than by asking her for help?
+
+
+XII
+
+What it really came to, on the morrow, this first time--the time Kate
+went with her--was that the great man had, a little, to excuse himself;
+had, by a rare accident--for he kept his consulting-hours in general
+rigorously free--but ten minutes to give her; ten mere minutes which he
+yet placed at her service in a manner that she admired even more than
+she could meet it: so crystal-clean the great empty cup of attention
+that he set between them on the table. He was presently to jump into
+his carriage, but he promptly made the point that he must see her
+again, see her within a day or two; and he named for her at once
+another hour--easing her off beautifully too even then in respect to
+her possibly failing of justice to her errand. The minutes affected her
+in fact as ebbing more swiftly than her little army of items could
+muster, and they would probably have gone without her doing much more
+than secure another hearing, had it not been for her sense, at the
+last, that she had gained above all an impression. The impression--all
+the sharp growth of the final few moments--was neither more nor less
+than that she might make, of a sudden, in quite another world, another
+straight friend, and a friend who would moreover be, wonderfully, the
+most appointed, the most thoroughly adjusted of the whole collection,
+inasmuch as he would somehow wear the character scientifically,
+ponderably, proveably--not just loosely and sociably. Literally,
+furthermore, it wouldn't really depend on herself, Sir Luke Strett's
+friendship, in the least; perhaps what made her most stammer and pant
+was its thus queerly coming over her that she might find she had
+interested him even beyond her intention, find she was in fact launched
+in some current that would lose itself in the sea of science. At the
+same time that she struggled, however, she also surrendered; there was
+a moment at which she almost dropped the form of stating, of
+explaining, and threw herself, without violence, only with a supreme
+pointless quaver that had turned, the next instant, to an intensity of
+interrogative stillness, upon his general goodwill. His large, settled
+face, though firm, was not, as she had thought at first, hard; he
+looked, in the oddest manner, to her fancy, half like a general and
+half like a bishop, and she was soon sure that, within some such
+handsome range, what it would show her would be what was good, what was
+best for her. She had established, in other words, in this time-saving
+way, a relation with it; and the relation was the special trophy that,
+for the hour, she bore off. It was like an absolute possession, a new
+resource altogether, something done up in the softest silk and tucked
+away under the arm of memory. She hadn't had it when she went in, and
+she had it when she came out; she had it there under her cloak, but
+dissimulated, invisibly carried, when smiling, smiling, she again faced
+Kate Croy. That young lady had of course awaited her in another room,
+where, as the great man was to absent himself, no one else was in
+attendance; and she rose for her with such a face of sympathy as might
+have graced the vestibule of a dentist. "Is it out?" she seemed to ask
+as if it had been a question of a tooth; and Milly indeed kept her in
+no suspense at all.
+
+"He's a dear. I'm to come again."
+
+"But what does he say?"
+
+Milly was almost gay. "That I'm not to worry about anything in the
+world, and that if I'll be a good girl and do exactly what he tells me,
+he'll take care of me for ever and ever."
+
+Kate wondered as if things scarce fitted. "But does he allow then that
+you're ill?"
+
+"I don't know what he allows, and I don't care. I shall know, and
+whatever it is it will be enough. He knows all about me, and I like it.
+I don't hate it a bit."
+
+Still, however, Kate stared. "But could he, in so few minutes, ask you
+enough----?"
+
+"He asked me scarcely anything--he doesn't need to do anything so
+stupid," Milly said. "He can tell. He knows," she repeated; "and when I
+go back--for he'll have thought me over a little--it will be all right."
+
+Kate, after a moment, made the best of this. "Then when are we to come?"
+
+It just pulled her friend up, for even while they talked--at least it
+was one of the reasons--she stood there suddenly, irrelevantly, in the
+light of her _other_ identity, the identity she would have for Mr.
+Densher. This was always, from one instant to another, an incalculable
+light, which, though it might go off faster than it came on,
+necessarily disturbed. It sprang, with a perversity all its own, from
+the fact that, with the lapse of hours and days, the chances themselves
+that made for his being named continued so oddly to fail. There were
+twenty, there were fifty, but none of them turned up. This, in
+particular, was of course not a juncture at which the least of them
+would naturally be present; but it would make, none the less, Milly
+saw, another day practically all stamped with avoidance. She saw in a
+quick glimmer, and with it all Kate's unconsciousness; and then she
+shook off the obsession. But it had lasted long enough to qualify her
+response. No, she had shown Kate how she trusted her; and that, for
+loyalty, would somehow do. "Oh, dear thing, now that the ice is broken
+I shan't trouble _you_ again."
+
+"You'll come alone?"
+
+"Without a scruple. Only I shall ask you, please, for your absolute
+discretion still."
+
+Outside, before the door, on the wide pavement of the great square,
+they had to wait again while their carriage, which Milly had kept,
+completed a further turn of exercise, engaged in by the coachman for
+reasons of his own. The footman was there, and had indicated that he
+was making the circuit; so Kate went on while they stood. "But don't
+you ask a good deal, darling, in proportion to what you give?"
+
+This pulled Milly up still shorter--so short in fact that she yielded
+as soon as she had taken it in. But she continued to smile. "I see.
+Then you _can_ tell."
+
+"I don't want to 'tell,'" said Kate. "I'll be as silent as the tomb if
+I can only have the truth from you. All I want is that you shouldn't
+keep from me how you find out that you really are."
+
+"Well then, I won't, ever. But you see for yourself," Milly went on,
+"how I really am. I'm satisfied. I'm happy."
+
+Kate looked at her long. "I believe you like it. The way things turn
+out for you----!"
+
+Milly met her look now without a thought of anything but the spoken.
+She had ceased to be Mr. Densher's image; she was all her own memento
+and she was none the less fine. Still, still, what had passed was a
+fair bargain, and it would do. "Of course I like it. I feel--I can't
+otherwise describe it--as if I had been, on my knees, to the priest.
+I've confessed and I've been absolved. It has been lifted off."
+
+Kate's eyes never quitted her. "He must have liked _you."_
+
+"Oh--doctors!" Milly said. "But I hope," she added, "he didn't like me
+too much." Then as if to escape a little from her friend's deeper
+sounding, or as impatient for the carriage, not yet in sight, her eyes,
+turning away, took in the great stale square. As its staleness,
+however, was but that of London fairly fatigued, the late hot London
+with its dance all danced and its story all told, the air seemed a
+thing of blurred pictures and mixed echoes, and an impression met the
+sense--an impression that broke, the next moment, through the girl's
+tightened lips. "Oh, it's a beautiful big world, and everyone, yes,
+everyone----!" It presently brought her back to Kate, and she hoped she
+didn't actually look as much as if she were crying as she must have
+looked to Lord Mark among the portraits at Matcham.
+
+Kate at all events understood. "Everyone wants to be so nice?"
+
+"So nice," said the grateful Milly.
+
+"Oh," Kate laughed, "we'll pull you through! And won't you now bring
+Mrs. Stringham?"
+
+But Milly after an instant was again clear about that. "Not till I've
+seen him once more."
+
+She was to have found this preference, two days later, abundantly
+justified; and yet when, in prompt accordance with what had passed
+between them, she reappeared before her distinguished friend--that
+character having, for him, in the interval, built itself up still
+higher--the first thing he asked her was whether she had been
+accompanied. She told him, on this, straightway, everything; completely
+free at present from her first embarrassment, disposed even--as she
+felt she might become--to undue volubility, and conscious moreover of
+no alarm from his thus perhaps wishing that she had not come alone. It
+was exactly as if, in the forty-eight hours that had passed, her
+acquaintance with him had somehow increased, and his own knowledge in
+particular received mysterious additions. They had been together,
+before, scarce ten minutes; but the relation, the one the ten minutes
+had so beautifully created, was there to take straight up: and this
+not, on his own part, from mere professional heartiness, mere bedside
+manner, which she would have disliked--much rather from a quiet,
+pleasant air in him of having positively asked about her, asked here
+and there and found out. Of course he couldn't in the least have asked,
+or have wanted to; there was no source of information to his hand, and
+he had really needed none: he had found out simply by his genius--and
+found out, she meant, literally everything. Now she knew not only that
+she didn't dislike this--the state of being found out about; but that,
+on the contrary, it was truly what she had come for, and that, for the
+time at least, it would give her something firm to stand on. She struck
+herself as aware, aware as she had never been, of really not having had
+from the beginning anything firm. It would be strange for the firmness
+to come, after all, from her learning in these agreeable conditions
+that she was in some way doomed; but above all it would prove how
+little she had hitherto had to hold her up. If she was now to be held
+up by the mere process--since that was perhaps on the cards--of being
+let down, this would only testify in turn to her queer little history.
+_That_ sense of loosely rattling had been no process at all; and it was
+ridiculously true that her thus sitting there to see her life put into
+the scales represented her first approach to the taste of orderly
+living. Such was Milly's romantic version--that her life, especially by
+the fact of this second interview, _was_ put into the scales; and just
+the best part of the relation established might have been, for that
+matter, that the great grave charming man knew, had known at once, that
+it was romantic, and in that measure allowed for it. Her only doubt,
+her only fear, was whether he perhaps wouldn't even take advantage of
+her being a little romantic to treat her as romantic altogether. This
+doubtless was her danger with him; but she should see, and dangers in
+general meanwhile dropped and dropped.
+
+The very place, at the end of a few minutes, the commodious, "handsome"
+room, far back in the fine old house, soundless from position, somewhat
+sallow with years of celebrity, somewhat sombre even at midsummer--the
+very place put on for her a look of custom and use, squared itself
+solidly round her as with promises and certainties. She had come forth
+to see the world, and this then was to be the world's light, the rich
+dusk of a London "back," these the world's walls, those the world's
+curtains and carpet. She should be intimate with the great bronze clock
+and mantel-ornaments, conspicuously presented in gratitude and long
+ago; she should be as one of the circle of eminent contemporaries,
+photographed, engraved, signatured, and in particular framed and
+glazed, who made up the rest of the decoration, and made up as well so
+much of the human comfort; and while she thought of all the clean
+truths, unfringed, unfingered, that the listening stillness, strained
+into pauses and waits, would again and again, for years, have kept
+distinct, she also wondered what she would eventually decide upon to
+present in gratitude. She would give something better at least than the
+brawny Victorian bronzes. This was precisely an instance of what she
+felt he knew of her before he had done with her: that she was secretly
+romancing at that rate, in the midst of so much else that was more
+urgent, all over the place. So much for her secrets with him, none of
+which really required to be phrased. It would have been, for example, a
+secret for her from any one else that without a dear lady she had
+picked up just before coming over she wouldn't have a decently near
+connection, of any sort, for such an appeal as she was making, to put
+forward: no one in the least, as it were, to produce for
+respectability. But _his_ seeing it she didn't mind a scrap, and not a
+scrap either his knowing how she had left the dear lady in the dark.
+She had come alone, putting her friend off with a fraud: giving a
+pretext of shops, of a whim, of she didn't know what--the amusement of
+being for once in the streets by herself. The streets by herself were
+new to her--she had always had in them a companion, or a maid; and he
+was never to believe, moreover, that she couldn't take full in the face
+anything he might have to say. He was softly amused at her account of
+her courage; though he yet showed it somehow without soothing her too
+grossly. Still, he did want to know whom she had. Hadn't there been a
+lady with her on Wednesday?
+
+"Yes--a different one. Not the one who's travelling with me. I've told
+_her."_
+
+Distinctly he was amused, and it added to his air--the greatest charm
+of all--of giving her lots of time. "You've told her what?"
+
+"Well," said Milly, "that I visit you in secret."
+
+"And how many persons will she tell?"
+
+"Oh, she's devoted. Not one."
+
+"Well, if she's devoted doesn't that make another friend for you?"
+
+It didn't take much computation, but she nevertheless had to think a
+moment, conscious as she was that he distinctly _would_ want to fill
+out his notion of her--even a little, as it were, to warm the air for
+her. That, however--and better early than late--he must accept as of no
+use; and she herself felt for an instant quite a competent certainty on
+the subject of any such warming. The air, for Milly Theale, was, from
+the very nature of the case, destined never to rid itself of a
+considerable chill. This she could tell him with authority, if she
+could tell him nothing else; and she seemed to see now, in short, that
+it would importantly simplify. "Yes, it makes another; but they all
+together wouldn't make--well, I don't know what to call it but the
+difference. I mean when one is--really alone. I've never seen anything
+like the kindness." She pulled up a minute while he waited--waited
+again as if with his reasons for letting her, for almost making her,
+talk. What she herself wanted was not, for the third time, to cry, as
+it were, in public. She _had_ never seen anything like the kindness,
+and she wished to do it justice; but she knew what she was about, and
+justice was not wronged by her being able presently to stick to her
+point. "Only one's situation is what it is. It's me it concerns. The
+rest is delightful and useless. Nobody can really help. That's why I'm
+by myself to-day. I _want_ to be--in spite of Miss Croy, who came with
+me last. If you can help, so much the better and also of course if one
+can, a little, one's self. Except for that--you and me doing our
+best--I like you to see me just as I am. Yes, I like it--and I don't
+exaggerate. Shouldn't one, at the start, show the worst--so that
+anything after that may be better? It wouldn't make any real
+difference--it _won't_ make any, anything that may happen won't--to any
+one. Therefore I feel myself, this way, with you, just as I am; and--if
+you do in the least care to know--it quite positively bears me up." She
+put it as to his caring to know, because his manner seemed to give her
+all her chance, and the impression was there for her to take. It was
+strange and deep for her, this impression, and she did, accordingly,
+take it straight home. It showed him--showed him in spite of
+himself--as allowing, somewhere far within, things comparatively
+remote, things in fact quite, as she would have said, outside,
+delicately to weigh with him; showed him as interested, on her behalf,
+in other questions beside the question of what was the matter with her.
+She accepted such an interest as regular in the highest type of
+scientific mind--his _being_ the even highest, magnificently because
+otherwise, obviously, it wouldn't be there; but she could at the same
+time take it as a direct source of light upon herself, even though that
+might present her a little as pretending to equal him. Wanting to know
+more about a patient than how a patient was constructed or deranged
+couldn't be, even on the part of the greatest of doctors, anything but
+some form or other of the desire to let the patient down easily. When
+that was the case the reason, in turn, could only be, too manifestly,
+pity; and when pity held up its tell-tale face like a head on a pike,
+in a French revolution, bobbing before a window, what was the inference
+but that the patient was bad? He might say what he would now--she would
+always have seen the head at the window; and in fact from this moment
+she only wanted him to say what he would. He might say it too with the
+greater ease to himself as there wasn't one of her divinations that--as
+her own--he would in any way put himself out for. Finally, if he was
+making her talk she _was_ talking; and what it could, at any rate, come
+to for him was that she wasn't afraid. If he wanted to do the dearest
+thing in the world for her he would show her he believed she wasn't;
+which undertaking of hers--not to have misled him--was what she counted
+at the moment as her presumptuous little hint to him that she was as
+good as himself. It put forward the bold idea that he could really _be_
+misled; and there actually passed between them for some seconds a sign,
+a sign of the eyes only, that they knew together where they were. This
+made, in their brown old temple of truth, its momentary flicker; then
+what followed it was that he had her, all the same, in his pocket; and
+the whole thing wound up, for that consummation, with its kind dim
+smile. Such kindness was wonderful with such dimness; but
+brightness--that even of sharp steel--was of course for the other side
+of the business, and it would all come in for her in one way or
+another. "Do you mean," he asked, "that you've no relations at
+all?--not a parent, not a sister, not even a cousin nor an aunt?"
+
+She shook her head as with the easy habit of an interviewed heroine or
+a freak of nature at a show. "Nobody whatever." But the last thing she
+had come for was to be dreary about it. "I'm a survivor--a survivor of
+a general wreck. You see," she added, "how that's to be taken into
+account--that everyone else _has_ gone. When I was ten years old there
+were, with my father and my mother, six of us. I'm all that's left. But
+they died," she went on, to be fair all round, "of different things.
+Still, there it is. And, as I told you before, I'm American. Not that I
+mean that makes me worse. However, you'll probably know what it makes
+me."
+
+"Yes," he discreetly indulged her; "I know perfectly what it makes you.
+It makes you, to begin with, a capital case."
+
+She sighed, though gratefully, as if again before the social scene.
+"Ah, there you are!"
+
+"Oh, no; there 'we' aren't at all. There I am only--but as much as you
+like. I've no end of American friends: there _they_ are, if you please,
+and it's a fact that you couldn't very well be in a better place than
+in their company. It puts you with plenty of others--and that isn't
+pure solitude." Then he pursued: "I'm sure you've an excellent spirit;
+but don't try to bear more things than you need." Which after an
+instant he further explained. "Hard things have come to you in youth,
+but you mustn't think life will be for you all hard things. You've the
+right to be happy. You must make up your mind to it. You must accept
+any form in which happiness may come."
+
+"Oh, I'll accept any whatever!" she almost gaily returned. "And it
+seems to me, for that matter, that I'm accepting a new one every day.
+Now _this!"_ she smiled.
+
+"This is very well so far as it goes. You can depend on me," the great
+man said, "for unlimited interest. But I'm only, after all, one element
+in fifty. We must gather in plenty of others. Don't mind who knows.
+Knows, I mean, that you and I are friends."
+
+"Ah, you do want to see some one!" she broke out. "You want to get at
+some one who cares for me." With which, however, as he simply met this
+spontaneity in a manner to show that he had often had it from young
+persons of her race, and that he was familiar even with the
+possibilities of their familiarity, she felt her freedom rendered vain
+by his silence, and she immediately tried to think of the most
+reasonable thing she could say. This would be, precisely, on the
+subject of that freedom, which she now quickly spoke of as complete.
+"That's of course by itself a great boon; so please don't think I don't
+know it. I can do exactly what I like--anything in all the wide world.
+I haven't a creature to ask--there's not a finger to stop me. I can
+shake about till I'm black and blue. That perhaps isn't _all_ joy; but
+lots of people, I know, would like to try it." He had appeared about to
+put a question, but then had let her go on, which she promptly did, for
+she understood him the next moment as having thus taken it from her
+that her means were as great as might be. She had simply given it to
+him so, and this was all that would ever pass between them on the
+odious head. Yet she couldn't help also knowing that an important
+effect, for his judgment, or at least for his amusement--which was his
+feeling, since, marvellously, he did have feeling--was produced by it.
+All her little pieces had now then fallen together for him like the
+morsels of coloured glass that used to make combinations, under the
+hand, in the depths of one of the polygonal peepshows of childhood. "So
+that if it's a question of my doing anything under the sun that will
+help----!"
+
+"You'll _do_ anything under the sun? Good." He took that beautifully,
+ever so pleasantly, for what it was worth; but time was needed--ten
+minutes or so were needed on the spot--to deal even provisionally, with
+the substantive question. It was convenient, in its degree, that there
+was nothing she wouldn't do; but it seemed also highly and agreeably
+vague that she should have to do anything. They thus appeared to be
+taking her, together, for the moment, and almost for sociability, as
+prepared to proceed to gratuitous extremities; the upshot of which was
+in turn, that after much interrogation, auscultation, exploration, much
+noting of his own sequences and neglecting of hers, had duly kept up
+the vagueness, they might have struck themselves, or may at least
+strike us, as coming back from an undeterred but useless voyage to the
+north pole. Milly was ready, under orders, for the north pole; which
+fact was doubtless what made a blinding anticlimax of her friend's
+actual abstention from orders. "No," she heard him again distinctly
+repeat it, "I don't want you for the present to do anything at all;
+anything, that is, but obey a small prescription or two that will be
+made clear to you, and let me within a few days come to see you at
+home."
+
+It was at first heavenly. "Then you'll see Mrs. Stringham." But she
+didn't mind a bit now.
+
+"Well, I shan't be afraid of Mrs. Stringham." And he said it once more
+as she asked once more: "Absolutely not; I 'send' you nowhere.
+England's all right--anywhere that's pleasant, convenient, decent, will
+be all right. You say you can do exactly as you like. Oblige me
+therefore by being so good as to do it. There's only one thing: you
+ought of course, now, as soon as I've seen you again, to get out of
+London."
+
+Milly thought. "May I then go back to the continent?"
+
+"By all means back to the continent. Do go back to the continent."
+
+"Then how will you keep seeing me? But perhaps," she quickly added,
+"you won't want to keep seeing me."
+
+He had it all ready; he had really everything all ready. "I shall
+follow you up; though if you mean that I don't want you to keep seeing
+_me_----"
+
+"Well?" she asked.
+
+It was only just here that he struck her the least bit as stumbling.
+"Well, see all you can. That's what it comes to. Worry about nothing.
+You _have_ at least no worries. It's a great, rare chance."
+
+She had got up, for she had had from him both that he would send her
+something and would advise her promptly of the date of his coming to
+her, by which she was virtually dismissed. Yet, for herself, one or two
+things kept her. "May I come back to England too?"
+
+"Rather! Whenever you like. But always, when you do come, immediately
+let me know."
+
+"Ah," said Milly, "it won't be a great going to and fro."
+
+"Then if you'll stay with us, so much the better."
+
+It touched her, the way he controlled his impatience of her; and the
+fact itself affected her as so precious that she yielded to the wish to
+get more from it. "So you don't think I'm out of my mind?"
+
+"Perhaps that _is,"_ he smiled, "all that's the matter."
+
+She looked at him longer. "No, that's too good. Shall I, at any rate,
+suffer?"
+
+"Not a bit."
+
+"And yet then live?"
+
+"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?"
+
+
+XIII
+
+She had gone out with these last words so in her ears that when once
+she was well away--back this time in the great square alone--it was as
+if some instant application of them had opened out there before her. It
+was positively, this effect, an excitement that carried her on; she
+went forward into space under the sense of an impulse received--an
+impulse simple and direct, easy above all to act upon. She was borne up
+for the hour, and now she knew why she had wanted to come by herself.
+No one in the world could have sufficiently entered into her state; no
+tie would have been close enough to enable a companion to walk beside
+her without some disparity. She literally felt, in this first flush,
+that her only company must be the human race at large, present all
+round her, but inspiringly impersonal, and that her only field must be,
+then and there, the grey immensity of London. Grey immensity had
+somehow of a sudden become her element; grey immensity was what her
+distinguished friend had, for the moment, furnished her world with and
+what the question of "living," as he put it to her, living by option,
+by volition, inevitably took on for its immediate face. She went
+straight before her, without weakness, altogether with strength; and
+still as she went she was more glad to be alone, for nobody--not Kate
+Croy, not Susan Shepherd either--would have wished to rush with her as
+she rushed. She had asked him at the last whether, being on foot, she
+might go home so, or elsewhere, and he had replied as if almost amused
+again at her extravagance: "You're active, luckily, by nature--it's
+beautiful: therefore rejoice in it. _Be_ active, without folly--for
+you're not foolish: be as active as you can and as you like." That had
+been in fact the final push, as well as the touch that most made a
+mixture of her consciousness--a strange mixture that tasted at one and
+the same time of what she had lost and what had been given her. It was
+wonderful to her, while she took her random course, that these
+quantities felt so equal: she had been treated--hadn't she?--as if it
+were in her power to live; and yet one wasn't treated so--was
+one?--unless it came up, quite as much, that one might die. The beauty
+of the bloom had gone from the small old sense of safety--that was
+distinct: she had left it behind her there forever. But the beauty of
+the idea of a great adventure, a big dim experiment or struggle in
+which she might, more responsibly than ever before, take a hand, had
+been offered her instead. It was as if she had had to pluck off her
+breast, to throw away, some friendly ornament, a familiar flower, a
+little old jewel, that was part of her daily dress; and to take up and
+shoulder as a substitute some queer defensive weapon, a musket, a
+spear, a battle-axe conducive possibly in a higher degree to a striking
+appearance, but demanding all the effort of the military posture. She
+felt this instrument, for that matter, already on her back, so that she
+proceeded now in very truth as a soldier on a march--proceeded as if,
+for her initiation, the first charge had been sounded. She passed along
+unknown streets, over dusty littery ways, between long rows of fronts
+not enhanced by the August light; she felt good for miles and only
+wanted to get lost; there were moments at corners, where she stopped
+and chose her direction, in which she quite lived up to his injunction
+to rejoice that she was active. It was like a new pleasure to have so
+new a reason; she would affirm, without delay, her option, her
+volition; taking this personal possession of what surrounded her was a
+fair affirmation to start with; and she really didn't care if she made
+it at the cost of alarms for Susie. Susie would wonder in due course
+"whatever," as they said at the hotel, had become of her; yet this
+would be nothing either, probably, to wonderments still in store.
+Wonderments in truth, Milly felt, even now attended her steps: it was
+quite as if she saw in people's eyes the reflection of her appearance
+and pace. She found herself moving at times in regions visibly not
+haunted by odd-looking girls from New York, duskily draped,
+sable-plumed, all but incongruously shod and gazing about them with
+extravagance; she might, from the curiosity she clearly excited in
+byways, in side-streets peopled with grimy children and costermongers
+carts, which she hoped were slums, literally have had her musket on her
+shoulder, have announced herself as freshly on the warpath. But for the
+fear of overdoing this character she would here and there have begun
+conversation, have asked her way; in spite of the fact that, as that
+would help the requirements of adventure, her way was exactly what she
+wanted not to know. The difficulty was that she at last accidentally
+found it; she had come out, she presently saw, at the Regent's Park,
+round which, on two or three occasions with Kate Croy, her public
+chariot had solemnly rolled. But she went into it further now; this was
+the real thing; the real thing was to be quite away from the pompous
+roads, well within the centre and on the stretches of shabby grass.
+Here were benches and smutty sheep; here were idle lads at games of
+ball, with their cries mild in the thick air; here were wanderers,
+anxious and tired like herself; here doubtless were hundreds of others
+just in the same box. Their box, their great common anxiety, what was
+it, in this grim breathing-space, but the practical question of life?
+They could live if they would; that is, like herself, they had been
+told so; she saw them all about her, on seats, digesting the
+information, feeling it altered, assimilated, recognising it again as
+something, in a slightly different shape, familiar enough, the blessed
+old truth that they would live if they could. All she thus shared with
+them made her wish to sit in their company; which she so far did that
+she looked for a bench that was empty, eschewing a still emptier chair
+that she saw hard by and for which she would have paid, with
+superiority, a fee.
+
+The last scrap of superiority had soon enough left her, if only because
+she before long knew herself for more tired than she had proposed. This
+and the charm, after a fashion, of the situation in itself made her
+linger and rest; there was a sort of spell in the sense that nobody in
+the world knew where she was. It was the first time in her life that
+this had happened; somebody, everybody appeared to have known before,
+at every instant of it, where she was; so that she was now suddenly
+able to put it to herself that that hadn't been a life. This present
+kind of thing therefore might be--which was where precisely her
+distinguished friend seemed to be wishing her to come out. He wished
+her also, it was true, not to make, as she was perhaps doing now, too
+much of her isolation; at the same time however as he clearly desired
+to deny her no decent source of interest. He was interested--she
+arrived at that--in her appealing to as many sources as possible; and
+it fairly filtered into her, as she sat and sat, that he was
+essentially propping her up. Had she been doing it herself she would
+have called it bolstering--the bolstering that was simply for the weak;
+and she thought and thought as she put together the proofs that it was
+as one of the weak he was treating her. It was of course as one of the
+weak that she had gone to him--but, oh, with how sneaking a hope that
+he might pronounce her, as to all indispensables, a veritable young
+lioness! What indeed she was really confronted with was the
+consciousness that he had not, after all, pronounced her anything: she
+nursed herself into the sense that he had beautifully got out of it.
+Did he think, however, she wondered, that he could keep out of it to
+the end?--though, as she weighed the question, she yet felt it a little
+unjust. Milly weighed, in this extraordinary hour, questions numerous
+and strange; but she had, happily, before she moved, worked round to a
+simplification. Stranger than anything, for instance, was the effect of
+its rolling over her that, when one considered it, he might perhaps
+have "got out" by one door but to come in with a beautiful, beneficent
+dishonesty by another. It kept her more intensely motionless there that
+what he might fundamentally be "up to" was some disguised intention of
+standing by her as a friend. Wasn't that what women always said they
+wanted to do when they deprecated the addresses of gentlemen they
+couldn't more intimately go on with? It was what they, no doubt,
+sincerely fancied they could make of men of whom they couldn't make
+husbands. And she didn't even reason that it was, by a similar law, the
+expedient of doctors in general for the invalids of whom they couldn't
+make patients: she was somehow so sufficiently aware that _her_ doctor
+was--however fatuous it might sound--exceptionally moved. This was the
+damning little fact--if she could talk of damnation: that she could
+believe herself to have caught him in the act of irrelevantly liking
+her. She hadn't gone to him to be liked, she had gone to him to be
+judged; and he was quite a great enough man to be in the habit, as a
+rule, of observing the difference. She could like _him,_ as she
+distinctly did--that was another matter; all the more that her doing so
+was now, so obviously for herself, compatible with judgment. Yet it
+would have been all portentously mixed had not, as we say, a final,
+merciful wave, chilling rather, but washing clear, come to her
+assistance.
+
+It came, of a sudden, when all other thought was spent. She had been
+asking herself why, if her case was grave--and she knew what she meant
+by that--he should have talked to her at all about what she might with
+futility "do"; or why on the other hand, if it were light, he should
+attach an importance to the office of friendship. She had him, with her
+little lonely acuteness--as acuteness went during the dog-days in the
+Regent's Park--in a cleft stick: she either mattered, and then she was
+ill; or she didn't matter, and then she was well enough. Now he was
+"acting," as they said at home, as if she did matter--until he should
+prove the contrary. It was too evident that a person at his high
+pressure must keep his inconsistencies, which were probably his highest
+amusements, only for the very greatest occasions. Her prevision, in
+fine, of just where she should catch him furnished the light of that
+judgment in which we describe her as daring to indulge. And the
+judgment it was that made her sensation simple. He _had_ distinguished
+her--that was the chill. He hadn't known--how could he?--that she was
+devilishly subtle, subtle exactly in the manner of the suspected, the
+suspicious, the condemned. He in fact confessed to it, in his way, as
+to an interest in her combinations, her funny race, her funny losses,
+her funny gains, her funny freedom, and, no doubt, above all, her funny
+manners--funny, like those of Americans at their best, without being
+vulgar, legitimating amiability and helping to pass it off. In his
+appreciation of these redundancies he dressed out for her the
+compassion he so signally permitted himself to waste; but its operation
+for herself was as directly divesting, denuding, exposing. It reduced
+her to her ultimate state, which was that of a poor girl with her rent
+to pay for example--staring before her in a great city. Milly had her
+rent to pay, her rent for her future; everything else but how to meet
+it fell away from her in pieces, in tatters. This was the sensation the
+great man had doubtless not purposed. Well, she must go home, like the
+poor girl, and see. There might after all be ways; the poor girl too
+would be thinking. It came back for that matter perhaps to views
+already presented. She looked about her again, on her feet, at her
+scattered, melancholy comrades--some of them so melancholy as to be
+down on their stomachs in the grass, turned away, ignoring, burrowing;
+she saw once more, with them, those two faces of the question between
+which there was so little to choose for inspiration. It was perhaps
+superficially more striking that one could live if one would; but it
+was more appealing, insinuating, irresistible, in short, that one would
+live if one could.
+
+She found after this, for the day or two, more amusement than she had
+ventured to count on in the fact, if it were not a mere fancy, of
+deceiving Susie; and she presently felt that what made the difference
+was the mere fancy--as this _was_ one--of a countermove to her great
+man. His taking on himself--should he do so--to get at her companion
+made her suddenly, she held, irresponsible, made any notion of her own
+all right for her; though indeed at the very moment she invited herself
+to enjoy this impunity she became aware of new matter for surprise, or
+at least for speculation. Her idea would rather have been that Mrs.
+Stringham would have looked at her hard--her sketch of the grounds of
+her long, independent excursion showing, she could feel, as almost
+cynically superficial. Yet the dear woman so failed, in the event, to
+avail herself of any right of criticism that it was sensibly tempting,
+for an hour, to wonder if Kate Croy had been playing perfectly fair.
+Hadn't she possibly, from motives of the highest benevolence,
+promptings of the finest anxiety, just given poor Susie what she would
+have called the straight tip? It must immediately be mentioned,
+however, that, quite apart from a remembrance of the distinctness of
+Kate's promise, Milly, the next thing, found her explanation in a truth
+that had the merit of being general. If Susie, at this crisis,
+suspiciously spared her, it was really that Susie was always
+suspiciously sparing her--yet occasionally, too, with portentous and
+exceptional mercies. The girl was conscious of how she dropped at times
+into inscrutable, impenetrable deferences--attitudes that, though
+without at all intending it, made a difference for familiarity, for the
+ease of intimacy. It was as if she recalled herself to manners, to the
+law of court-etiquette--which last note above all helped our young
+woman to a just appreciation. It was definite for her, even if not
+quite solid, that to treat her as a princess was a positive need of her
+companion's mind; wherefore she couldn't help it if this lady had her
+transcendent view of the way the class in question were treated. Susan
+had read history, had read Gibbon and Froude and Saint-Simon; she had
+high-lights as to the special allowances made for the class, and, since
+she saw them, when young, as effete and overtutored, inevitably ironic
+and infinitely refined, one must take it for amusing if she inclined to
+an indulgence verily Byzantine. If one _could_ only be
+Byzantine!--wasn't _that_ what she insidiously led one on to sigh?
+Milly tried to oblige her--for it really placed Susan herself so
+handsomely to be Byzantine now. The great ladies of that race--it would
+be somewhere in Gibbon--weren't, apparently, questioned about their
+mysteries. But oh, poor Milly and hers! Susan at all events proved
+scarce more inquisitive than if she had been a mosaic at Ravenna. Susan
+was a porcelain monument to the odd moral that consideration might,
+like cynicism, have abysses. Besides, the Puritan finally
+disencumbered----! What starved generations wasn't Mrs. Stringham, in
+fancy, going to make up for?
+
+Kate Croy came straight to the hotel--came that evening shortly before
+dinner; specifically and publicly moreover, in a hansom that, driven
+apparently very fast, pulled up beneath their windows almost with the
+clatter of an accident, a "smash." Milly, alone, as happened, in the
+great garnished void of their sitting-room, where, a little, really,
+like a caged Byzantine, she had been pacing through the queer,
+long-drawn, almost sinister delay of night, an effect she yet
+liked--Milly, at the sound, one of the French windows standing open,
+passed out to the balcony that overhung, with pretensions, the general
+entrance, and so was in time for the look that Kate, alighting, paying
+her cabman, happened to send up to the front. The visitor moreover had
+a shilling back to wait for, during which Milly, from the balcony,
+looked down at her, and a mute exchange, but with smiles and nods, took
+place between them on what had occurred in the morning. It was what
+Kate had called for, and the tone was thus, almost by accident,
+determined for Milly before her friend came up. What was also, however,
+determined for her was, again, yet irrepressibly again, that the image
+presented to her, the splendid young woman who looked so particularly
+handsome in impatience, with the fine freedom of her signal, was the
+peculiar property of somebody else's vision, that this fine freedom in
+short was the fine freedom she showed Mr. Densher. Just so was how she
+looked to him, and just so was how Milly was held by her--held as by
+the strange sense of seeing through that distant person's eyes. It
+lasted, as usual, the strange sense, but fifty seconds; yet in so
+lasting it produced an effect. It produced in fact more than one, and
+we take them in their order. The first was that it struck our young
+woman as absurd to say that a girl's looking so to a man could possibly
+be without connections; and the second was that by the time Kate had
+got into the room Milly was in mental possession of the main connection
+it must have for herself.
+
+She produced this commodity on the spot--produced it, that is, in
+straight response to Kate's frank "Well, what?" The inquiry bore of
+course, with Kate's eagerness, on the issue of the morning's scene, the
+great man's latest wisdom, and it doubtless affected Milly a little as
+the cheerful demand for news is apt to affect troubled spirits when
+news is not, in one of the neater forms, prepared for delivery. She
+couldn't have said what it was exactly that, on the instant, determined
+her; the nearest description of it would perhaps have been as the more
+vivid impression of all her friend took for granted. The contrast
+between this free quantity and the maze of possibilities through which,
+for hours, she had herself been picking her way, put on, in short, for
+the moment, a grossness that even friendly forms scarce lightened: it
+helped forward in fact the revelation to herself that she absolutely
+had nothing to tell. Besides which, certainly, there was something
+else--an influence, at the particular juncture, still more obscure.
+Kate had lost, on the way upstairs, the look--_the_ look--that made her
+young hostess so subtly think and one of the signs of which was that
+she never kept it for many moments at once; yet she stood there, none
+the less, so in her bloom and in her strength, so completely again the
+"handsome girl" beyond all others, the "handsome girl" for whom Milly
+had at first gratefully taken her, that to meet her now with the note
+of the plaintive would amount somehow to a surrender, to a confession.
+_She_ would never in her life be ill; the greatest doctor would keep
+her, at the worst, the fewest minutes; and it was as if she had asked
+just _with_ all this practical impeccability for all that was most
+mortal in her friend. These things, for Milly, inwardly danced their
+dance; but the vibration produced and the dust kicked up had lasted
+less than our account of them. Almost before she knew it she was
+answering, and answering, beautifully, with no consciousness of fraud,
+only as with a sudden flare of the famous "will-power" she had heard
+about, read about, and which was what her medical adviser had mainly
+thrown her back on. "Oh, it's all right. He's lovely."
+
+Kate was splendid, and it would have been clear for Milly now, had the
+further presumption been needed, that she had said no word to Mrs.
+Stringham. "You mean you've been absurd?"
+
+"Absurd." It was a simple word to say, but the consequence of it, for
+our young woman, was that she felt it, as soon as spoken, to have done
+something for her safety.
+
+And Kate really hung on her lips. "There's nothing at all the matter?"
+
+"Nothing to worry about. I shall take a little watching, but I shan't
+have to do anything dreadful, or even, in the least, inconvenient. I
+can do in fact as I like." It was wonderful for Milly how just to put
+it so made all its pieces fall at present quite properly into places.
+
+Yet even before the full effect came Kate had seized, kissed, blessed
+her. "My love, you're too sweet! It's too dear! But it's as I was
+sure." Then she grasped the full beauty. "You can do as you like?"
+
+"Quite. Isn't it charming?"
+
+"Ah, but catch you," Kate triumphed with gaiety, _"not_ doing----! And
+what _shall_ you do?"
+
+"For the moment simply enjoy it. Enjoy"--Milly was completely
+luminous--"having got out of my scrape."
+
+"Learning, you mean, so easily, that you _are_ well."
+
+It was as if Kate had but too conveniently put the words into her
+mouth. "Learning, I mean, so easily, that I _am_ well."
+
+"Only, no one's of course well enough to stay in London now. He can't,"
+Kate went on, "want this of you."
+
+"Mercy, no--I'm to knock about. I'm to go to places."
+
+"But not beastly 'climates'--Engadines, Rivieras, boredoms?"
+
+"No; just, as I say, where I prefer. I'm to go in for pleasure."
+
+"Oh, the duck!"--Kate, with her own shades of familiarity, abounded.
+"But what kind of pleasure?"
+
+"The highest," Milly smiled.
+
+Her friend met it as nobly. "Which is the highest?"
+
+"Well, it's just our chance to find out. You must help me."
+
+"What have I wanted to do but help you," Kate asked, "from the moment I
+first laid eyes on you?" Yet with this too Kate had her wonder. "I like
+your talking, though, about that. What help, with your luck all round,
+do you want?"
+
+
+XIV
+
+Milly indeed at last couldn't say; so that she had really for the time
+brought it along to the point so oddly marked for her by her visitor's
+arrival, the truth that she was enviably strong. She carried this out,
+from that evening, for each hour still left her, and the more easily
+perhaps that the hours were now narrowly numbered. All she actually
+waited for was Sir Luke Strett's promised visit; as to her proceeding
+on which, however, her mind was quite made up. Since he wanted to get
+at Susie he should have the freest access, and then perhaps he would
+see how he liked it. What was between _them_ they might settle as
+between them, and any pressure it should lift from her own spirit they
+were at liberty to convert to their use. If the dear man wished to fire
+Susan Shepherd with a still higher ideal, he would only after all, at
+the worst, have Susan on his hands. If devotion, in a word, was what it
+would come up for the interested pair to organise, she was herself
+ready to consume it as the dressed and served dish. He had talked to
+her of her "appetite" her account of which, she felt, must have been
+vague. But for devotion, she could now see, this appetite would be of
+the best. Gross, greedy, ravenous--these were doubtless the proper
+names for her: she was at all events resigned in advance to the
+machinations of sympathy. The day that followed her lonely excursion
+was to be the last but two or three of their stay in London; and the
+evening of that day practically ranked for them as, in the matter of
+outside relations, the last of all. People were by this time quite
+scattered, and many of those who had so liberally manifested in calls,
+in cards, in evident sincerity about visits, later on, over the land,
+had positively passed in music out of sight; whether as members, these
+latter, more especially, of Mrs. Lowder's immediate circle or as
+members of Lord Mark's--our friends being by this time able to make the
+distinction. The general pitch had thus, decidedly, dropped, and the
+occasions still to be dealt with were special and few. One of these,
+for Milly, announced itself as the doctor's call already mentioned, as
+to which she had now had a note from him: the single other, of
+importance, was their appointed leave-taking--for the shortest
+separation--in respect to Mrs. Lowder and Kate. The aunt and the niece
+were to dine with them alone, intimately and easily--as easily as
+should be consistent with the question of their afterwards going on
+together to some absurdly belated party, at which they had had it from
+Aunt Maud that they would do well to show. Sir Luke was to make his
+appearance on the morrow of this, and in respect to that complication
+Milly had already her plan.
+
+The night was, at all events, hot and stale, and it was late enough by
+the time the four ladies had been gathered in, for their small session,
+at the hotel, where the windows were still open to the high balconies
+and the flames of the candles, behind the pink shades--disposed as for
+the vigil of watchers--were motionless in the air in which the season
+lay dead. What was presently settled among them was that Milly, who
+betrayed on this occasion a preference more marked than usual, should
+not hold herself obliged to climb that evening the social stair,
+however it might stretch to meet her, and that, Mrs. Lowder and Mrs.
+Stringham facing the ordeal together, Kate Croy should remain with her
+and await their return. It was a pleasure to Milly, ever, to send Susan
+Shepherd forth; she saw her go with complacency, liked, as it were, to
+put people off with her, and noted with satisfaction, when she so moved
+to the carriage, the further denudation--a markedly ebbing tide--of her
+little benevolent back. If it wasn't quite Aunt Maud's ideal, moreover,
+to take out the new American girl's funny friend instead of the new
+American girl herself, nothing could better indicate the range of that
+lady's merit than the spirit in which--as at the present hour for
+instance--she made the best of the minor advantage. And she did this
+with a broad, cheerful absence of illusion; she did it--confessing even
+as much to poor Susie--because, frankly, she _was_ good-natured. When
+Mrs. Stringham observed that her own light was too abjectly borrowed
+and that it was as a link alone, fortunately not missing, that she was
+valued, Aunt Maud concurred to the extent of the remark: "Well, my
+dear, you're better than nothing." To-night, furthermore, it came up
+for Milly that Aunt Maud had something particular in mind. Mrs.
+Stringham, before adjourning with her, had gone off for some shawl or
+other accessory, and Kate, as if a little impatient for their
+withdrawal, had wandered out to the balcony, where she hovered, for the
+time, unseen, though with scarce more to look at than the dim London
+stars and the cruder glow, up the street, on a corner, of a small
+public-house, in front of which a fagged cab-horse was thrown into
+relief. Mrs. Lowder made use of the moment: Milly felt as soon as she
+had spoken that what she was doing was somehow for use.
+
+"Dear Susan tells me that you saw, in America, Mr. Densher--whom I've
+never till now, as you may have noticed, asked you about. But do you
+mind at last, in connection with him, doing something for me?" She had
+lowered her fine voice to a depth, though speaking with all her rich
+glibness; and Milly, after a small sharpness of surprise, was already
+guessing the sense of her appeal. "Will you name him, in any way you
+like, to _her"_--and Aunt Maud gave a nod at the window; "so that you
+may perhaps find out whether he's back?"
+
+Ever so many things, for Milly, fell into line at this; it was a
+wonder, she afterwards thought, that she could be conscious of so many
+at once. She smiled hard, however, for them all. "But I don't know that
+it's important to me to 'find out.'" The array of things was further
+swollen, however, even as she said this, by its striking her as too
+much to say. She therefore tried as quickly to say less. "Except you
+mean, of course, that it's important to _you."_ She fancied Aunt Maud
+was looking at her almost as hard as she was herself smiling, and that
+gave her another impulse. "You know I never _have_ yet named him to
+her; so that if I should break out now----"
+
+"Well?"--Mrs. Lowder waited.
+
+"Why, she may wonder what I've been making a mystery of. She hasn't
+mentioned him, you know," Milly went on, "herself."
+
+"No"--her friend a little heavily weighed it--"she wouldn't. So it's
+she, you see then, who has made the mystery."
+
+Yes, Milly but wanted to see; only there was so much. "There has been
+of course no particular reason." Yet that indeed was neither here nor
+there. "Do you think," she asked, "he is back?"
+
+"It will be about his time, I gather, and rather a comfort to me
+definitely to know."
+
+"Then can't you ask her yourself?"
+
+"Ah, we never speak of him!"
+
+It helped Milly for the moment to the convenience of a puzzled pause.
+"Do you mean he's an acquaintance of whom you disapprove for her?"
+
+Aunt Maud, as well, just hung fire. "I disapprove of _her_ for the poor
+young man. She doesn't care for him."
+
+"And _he_ cares so much----?"
+
+"Too much, too much. And my fear is," said Mrs. Lowder, "that he
+privately besets her. She keeps it to herself, but I don't want her
+worried. Neither, in truth," she both generously and confidentially
+concluded, "do I want _him."_
+
+Milly showed all her own effort to meet the case. "But what can _I_ do?"
+
+"You can find out where they are. If I myself try," Mrs. Lowder
+explained, "I shall appear to treat them as if I supposed them
+deceiving me."
+
+"And you don't. You don't," Milly mused for her, "suppose them
+deceiving you."
+
+"Well," said Aunt Maud, whose fine onyx eyes failed to blink, even
+though Milly's questions might have been taken as drawing her rather
+further than she had originally meant to go--"well, Kate is thoroughly
+aware of my views for her, and that I take her being with me, at
+present, in the way she is with me, if you know what I mean, as a loyal
+assent to them. Therefore as my views don't happen to provide a place,
+at all, for Mr. Densher, much, in a manner, as I like him"--therefore,
+therefore in short she had been prompted to this step, though she
+completed her sense, but sketchily, with the rattle of her large fan.
+
+It assisted them perhaps, however, for the moment, that Milly was able
+to pick out of her sense what might serve as the clearest part of it.
+"You do like him then?"
+
+"Oh dear, yes. Don't you?"
+
+Milly hesitated, for the question was somehow as the sudden point of
+something sharp on a nerve that winced. She just caught her breath, but
+she had ground for joy afterwards, she felt, in not really having
+failed to choose with quickness sufficient, out of fifteen possible
+answers, the one that would best serve her. She was then almost proud,
+as well, that she had cheerfully smiled. "I did--three times--in New
+York." So came and went for her, in these simple words, the speech that
+was to figure for her, later on, that night, as the one she had ever
+uttered that cost her most. She was to lie awake, at all events, half
+the night, for the gladness of not having taken any line so really
+inferior as the denial of a happy impression.
+
+For Mrs. Lowder also, moreover, her simple words were the right ones;
+they were at any rate, that lady's laugh showed, in the natural note of
+the racy. "You dear American thing! But people may be very good, and
+yet not good for what one wants."
+
+"Yes," the girl assented, "even I suppose when what one wants is
+something very good."
+
+"Oh, my child, it would take too long just now to tell you all _I_
+want! I want everything at once and together--and ever so much for you
+too, you know. But you've seen us," Aunt Maud continued; "you'll have
+made out."
+
+"Ah," said Milly, "I _don't_ make out"; for again--it came that way in
+rushes--she felt an obscurity in things. "Why, if our friend here
+doesn't like him----"
+
+"Should I conceive her interested in keeping things from me?" Mrs.
+Lowder did justice to the question. "My dear, how can you ask? Put
+yourself in her place. She meets me, but on _her_ terms. Proud young
+women are proud young women. And proud old ones are--well, what _I_ am.
+Fond of you as we both are, you can help us."
+
+Milly tried to be inspired. "Does it come back then to my asking her
+straight?"
+
+At this, however, finally, Aunt Maud threw her up. "Oh, if you've so
+many reasons not----!"
+
+"I've not so many," Milly smiled "but I've one. If I break out so
+suddenly as knowing him, what will she make of my not having spoken
+before?"
+
+Mrs. Lowder looked blank at it. "Why should you care what she makes?
+You may have only been decently discreet."
+
+"Ah, I _have_ been," the girl made haste to say.
+
+"Besides," her friend went on, "I suggested to you, through Susan, your
+line."
+
+"Yes, that reason's a reason for _me."_
+
+"And for _me,"_ Mrs. Lowder insisted. "She's not therefore so stupid as
+not to do justice to grounds so marked. You can tell her perfectly that
+I had asked you to say nothing."
+
+"And may I tell her that you've asked me now to speak?"
+
+Mrs. Lowder might well have thought, yet, oddly, this pulled her up.
+"You can't do it without----?"
+
+Milly was almost ashamed to be raising so many difficulties. "I'll do
+what I can if you'll kindly tell me one thing more." She faltered a
+little--it was so prying; but she brought it out. "Will he have been
+writing to her?"
+
+"It's exactly, my dear, what I should like to know." Mrs. Lowder was at
+last impatient. "Push in for yourself, and I dare say she'll tell you."
+
+Even now, all the same, Milly had not quite fallen back. "It will be
+pushing in," she continued to smile, "for _you"_ She allowed her
+companion, however, no time to take this up. "The point will be that if
+he _has_ been writing she may have answered."
+
+"But what point, you subtle thing, is that?"
+
+"It isn't subtle, it seems to me, but quite simple," Milly said, "that
+if she has answered she has very possibly spoken of me."
+
+"Very certainly indeed. But what difference will it make?"
+
+The girl had a moment, at this, of thinking it natural that her
+interlocutress herself should so fail of subtlety. "It will make the
+difference that he will have written to her in answer that he knows me.
+And that, in turn," our young woman explained, "will give an oddity to
+my own silence."
+
+"How so, if she's perfectly aware of having given you no opening? The
+only oddity," Aunt Maud lucidly professed, "is for yourself. It's in
+_her_ not having spoken."
+
+"Ah, there we are!" said Milly.
+
+And she had uttered it, evidently, in a tone that struck her friend.
+"Then it _has_ troubled you?"
+
+But ah, the inquiry had only to be made to bring the rare colour with
+fine inconsequence, to her face. "Not, really, the least little bit!"
+And, quickly feeling the need to abound in this sense, she was on the
+point, to cut short, of declaring that she cared, after all, no scrap
+how much she obliged. Only she felt at this instant too the
+intervention of still other things. Mrs. Lowder was, in the first
+place, already beforehand, already affected as by the sudden vision of
+her having herself pushed too far. Milly could never judge from her
+face of her uppermost motive--it was so little, in its hard, smooth
+sheen, that kind of human countenance. She looked hard when she spoke
+fair; the only thing was that when she spoke hard she likewise didn't
+look soft. Something, none the less, had arisen in her now--a full
+appreciable tide, entering by the rupture of some bar. She announced
+that if what she had asked was to prove in the least a bore her young
+friend was not to dream of it; making her young friend at the same
+time, by the change in her tone, dream on the spot more profusely. She
+spoke with a belated light, Milly could apprehend--she could always
+apprehend--from pity; and the result of that perception, for the girl,
+was singular: it proved to her as quickly that Kate, keeping her
+secret, had been straight with her. From Kate distinctly then, as to
+why she was to be pitied, Aunt Maud knew nothing, and was thereby
+simply putting in evidence the fine side of her own character. This
+fine side was that she could almost at any hour, by a kindled
+preference or a diverted energy, glow for another interest than her
+own. She exclaimed as well, at this moment, that Milly must have been
+thinking, round the case, much more than she had supposed; and this
+remark could, at once, affect the girl as sharply as any other form of
+the charge of weakness. It was what everyone, if she didn't look out,
+would soon be saying--"There's something the matter with you!" What one
+was therefore one's self concerned immediately to establish was that
+there was nothing at all. "I shall like to help you; I shall like, so
+far as that goes, to help Kate herself," she made such haste as she
+could to declare; her eyes wandering meanwhile across the width of the
+room to that dusk of the balcony in which their companion perhaps a
+little unaccountably lingered. She suggested hereby her impatience to
+begin; she almost overtly wondered at the length of the opportunity
+this friend was giving them--referring it, however, so far as words
+went, to the other friend, breaking off with an amused: "How
+tremendously Susie must be beautifying!"
+
+It only marked Aunt Maud, none the less, as too preoccupied for her
+allusion. The onyx eyes were fixed upon her with a polished pressure
+that must signify some enriched benevolence. "Let it go, my dear. We
+shall, after all, soon enough see."
+
+"If he _has_ come back we shall certainly see," Milly after a moment
+replied; "for he'll probably feel that he can't quite civilly not come
+to see me. Then _there,"_ she remarked, "we shall be. It wouldn't then,
+you see, come through Kate at all--it would come through him. Except,"
+she wound up with a smile, "that he won't find me."
+
+She had the most extraordinary sense of interesting her interlocutress,
+in spite of herself, more than she wanted; it was as if her doom so
+floated her on that she couldn't stop--by very much the same trick it
+had played her with her doctor. "Shall you run away from him?"
+
+She neglected the question, wanting only now to get off. "Then," she
+went on, "you'll deal with Kate directly."
+
+"Shall you run away from _her?"_ Mrs. Lowder profoundly inquired, while
+they became aware of Susie's return through the room, opening out
+behind them, in which they had dined.
+
+This affected Milly as giving her but an instant; and suddenly, with
+it, everything she felt in the connection rose to her lips in a
+question that, even as she put it, she knew she was failing to keep
+colourless. "Is it your own belief that he _is_ with her?"
+
+Aunt Maud took it in--took in, that is, everything of the tone that she
+just wanted her not to; and the result for some seconds, was but to
+make their eyes meet in silence. Mrs. Stringham had rejoined them and
+was asking if Kate had gone--an inquiry at once answered by this young
+lady's reappearance. They saw her again in the open window, where,
+looking at them, she had paused--producing thus, on Aunt Maud's part,
+almost too impressive a "Hush!" Mrs. Lowder indeed, without loss of
+time, smothered any danger in a sweeping retreat with Susie; but
+Milly's words to her, just uttered, about dealing with her niece
+directly, struck our young woman as already recoiling on herself.
+Directness, however evaded, would be, fully, for _her;_ nothing in fact
+would ever have been for her so direct as the evasion. Kate had
+remained in the window, very handsome and upright, the outer dark
+framing in a highly favourable way her summery simplicities and
+lightnesses of dress. Milly had, given the relation of space, no real
+fear she had heard their talk; only she hovered there as with conscious
+eyes and some added advantage. Then indeed, with small delay, her
+friend sufficiently saw. The conscious eyes, the added advantage were
+but those she had now always at command--those proper to the person
+Milly knew as known to Merton Densher. It was for several seconds again
+as if the _total_ of her identity had been that of the person known to
+him--a determination having for result another sharpness of its own.
+Kate had positively but to be there just as she was to tell her he had
+come back. It seemed to pass between them, in fine, without a word,
+that he was in London, that he was perhaps only round the corner; and
+surely therefore no dealing of Milly's with her would yet have been so
+direct.
+
+
+XV
+
+It was doubtless because this queer form of directness had in itself,
+for the hour, seemed so sufficient that Milly was afterwards aware of
+having really, all the while--during the strange, indescribable session
+before the return of their companions--done nothing to intensify it. If
+she was most aware only afterwards, under the long, discurtained ordeal
+of the morrow's dawn, that was because she had really, till their
+evening's end came, ceased, after a little, to miss anything from their
+ostensible comfort. What was behind showed but in gleams and glimpses;
+what was in front never at all confessed to not holding the stage.
+Three minutes had not passed before Milly quite knew she should have
+done nothing Aunt Maud had just asked her. She knew it moreover by much
+the same light that had acted for her with that lady and with Sir Luke
+Strett. It pressed upon her then and there that she was still in a
+current determined, through her indifference, timidity, bravery,
+generosity--she scarce could say which--by others; that not she but the
+current acted, and that somebody else, always, was the keeper of the
+lock or the dam. Kate for example had but to open the flood-gate: the
+current moved in its mass--the current, as it had been, of her doing as
+Kate wanted. What, somehow, in the most extraordinary way in the world,
+_had_ Kate wanted but to be, of a sudden, more interesting than she had
+ever been? Milly, for their evening then, quite held her breath with
+the appreciation of it. If she hadn't been sure her companion would
+have had nothing, from her moments with Mrs. Lowder, to go by, she
+would almost have seen the admirable creature "cutting in" to
+anticipate a danger. This fantasy indeed, while they sat together,
+dropped after a little; even if only because other fantasies multiplied
+and clustered, making fairly, for our young woman, the buoyant medium
+in which her friend talked and moved. They sat together, I say, but
+Kate moved as much as she talked; she figured there, restless and
+charming, just perhaps a shade perfunctory, repeatedly quitting her
+place, taking slowly, to and fro, in the trailing folds of her light
+dress, the length of the room, and almost avowedly performing for the
+pleasure of her hostess.
+
+Mrs. Lowder had said to Milly at Matcham that she and her niece, as
+allies, could practically conquer the world; but though it was a speech
+about which there had even then been a vague, grand glamour, the girl
+read into it at present more of an approach to a meaning. Kate, for
+that matter, by herself, could conquer anything, and _she,_ Milly
+Theale, was probably concerned with the "world" only as the small scrap
+of it that most impinged on her and that was therefore first to be
+dealt with. On this basis of being dealt with she would doubtless
+herself do her share of the conquering: she would have something to
+supply, Kate something to take--each of them thus, to that tune,
+something for squaring with Aunt Maud's ideal. This in short was what
+it came to now--that the occasion, in the quiet late lamplight, had the
+quality of a rough rehearsal of the possible big drama. Milly knew
+herself dealt with--handsomely, completely: she surrendered to the
+knowledge, for so it was, she felt, that she supplied her helpful
+force. And what Kate had to take Kate took as freely and, to all
+appearance, as gratefully; accepting afresh, with each of her long,
+slow walks, the relation between them so established and consecrating
+her companion's surrender simply by the interest she gave it. The
+interest to Milly herself we naturally mean; the interest to Kate Milly
+felt as probably inferior. It easily and largely came for their present
+talk, for the quick flight of the hour before the breach of the
+spell--it all came, when considered, from the circumstance, not in the
+least abnormal, that the handsome girl was in extraordinary "form."
+Milly remembered her having said that she was at her best late at
+night; remembered it by its having, with its fine assurance, made her
+wonder when _she_ was at her best and how happy people must be who had
+such a fixed time. She had no time at all; she was never at her
+best--unless indeed it were exactly, as now, in listening, watching,
+admiring, collapsing. If Kate moreover, quite mercilessly, had never
+been so good, the beauty and the marvel of it was that she had never
+really been so frank; being a person of such a calibre, as Milly would
+have said, that, even while "dealing" with you and thereby, as it were,
+picking her steps, she could let herself go, could, in irony, in
+confidence, in extravagance, tell you things she had never told before.
+That was the impression--that she was telling things, and quite
+conceivably for her own relief as well; almost as if the errors of
+vision, the mistakes of proportion, the residuary innocence of spirit
+still to be remedied on the part of her auditor had their moments of
+proving too much for her nerves. She went at them just now, these
+sources of irritation, with an amused energy that it would have been
+open to Milly to regard as cynical and that was nevertheless called
+for--as to this the other was distinct--by the way that in certain
+connections the American mind broke down. It seemed at least--the
+American mind as sitting there thrilled and dazzled in Milly--not to
+understand English society without a separate confrontation with _all_
+the cases. It couldn't proceed by--there was some technical term she
+lacked until Milly suggested both analogy and induction, and then,
+differently, instinct, none of which were right: it had to be led up
+and introduced to each aspect of the monster, enabled to walk all round
+it, whether for the consequent exaggerated ecstasy or for the still
+more as appeared to this critic disproportionate shock. It might, the
+monster, Kate conceded, loom large for those born amid forms less
+developed and therefore no doubt less amusing; it might on some sides
+be a strange and dreadful monster, calculated to devour the unwary, to
+abase the proud, to scandalize the good; but if one had to live with it
+one must, not to be for ever sitting up, learn how: which was virtually
+in short to-night what the handsome girl showed herself as teaching.
+
+She gave away publicly, in this process, Lancaster Gate and everything
+it contained; she gave away, hand over hand, Milly's thrill continued
+to note, Aunt Maud and Aunt Maud's glories and Aunt Maud's
+complacencies; she gave herself away most of all, and it was naturally
+what most contributed to her candour. She didn't speak to her friend
+once more, in Aunt Maud's strain, of how they could scale the skies;
+she spoke, by her bright, perverse preference on this occasion, of the
+need, in the first place, of being neither stupid nor vulgar. It might
+have been a lesson, for our young American, in the art of seeing things
+as they were--a lesson so various and so sustained that the pupil had,
+as we have shown, but receptively to gape. The odd thing furthermore
+was that it could serve its purpose while explicitly disavowing every
+personal bias. It wasn't that she disliked Aunt Maud, who was
+everything she had on other occasions declared; but the dear woman,
+ineffaceably stamped by inscrutable nature and a dreadful art,
+wasn't--how _could_ she be?--what she wasn't. She wasn't any one. She
+wasn't anything. She wasn't anywhere. Milly mustn't think it--one
+couldn't, as a good friend, let her. Those hours at Matcham were
+_inespérées,_ were pure manna from heaven; or if not wholly that
+perhaps, with humbugging old Lord Mark as a backer, were vain as a
+ground for hopes and calculations. Lord Mark was very well, but he
+wasn't _the_ cleverest creature in England, and even if he had been he
+still wouldn't have been the most obliging. He weighed it out in
+ounces, and indeed each of the pair was really waiting for what the
+other would put down.
+
+"She has put down _you."_ said Milly, attached to the subject still;
+"and I think what you mean is that, on the counter, she still keeps
+hold of you."
+
+"Lest"--Kate took it up--"he should suddenly grab me and run? Oh, as he
+isn't ready to run, he's much less ready, naturally, to grab. I
+_am_--you're so far right as that--on the counter, when I'm not in the
+shop-window; in and out of which I'm thus conveniently, commercially
+whisked: the essence, all of it, of my position, and the price, as
+properly, of my aunt's protection." Lord Mark was substantially what
+she had begun with as soon as they were alone; the impression was even
+yet with Milly of her having sounded his name, having imposed it, as a
+topic, in direct opposition to the other name that Mrs. Lowder had left
+in the air and that all her own look, as we have seen, kept there at
+first for her companion. The immediate strange effect had been that of
+her consciously needing, as it were, an alibi--which, successfully, she
+so found. She had worked it to the end, ridden it to and fro across the
+course marked for Milly by Aunt Maud, and now she had quite, so to
+speak, broken it in. "The bore is that if she wants him so much--wants
+him, heaven forgive her! for _me_--he has put us all out, since your
+arrival, by wanting somebody else. I don't mean somebody else than you."
+
+Milly threw off the charm sufficiently to shake her head. "Then I
+haven't made out who it is. If I'm any part of his alternative he had
+better stop where he is."
+
+"Truly, truly?--always, always?"
+
+Milly tried to insist with an equal gaiety. "Would you like me to
+swear?"
+
+Kate appeared for a moment--though that was doubtless but gaiety
+too--to think. "Haven't we been swearing enough?"
+
+"You have perhaps, but I haven't, and I ought to give you the
+equivalent. At any rate there it is. Truly, truly as you say--'always,
+always.' So I'm not in the way."
+
+"Thanks," said Kate--"but that doesn't help me."
+
+"Oh, it's as simplifying for _him_ that I speak of it."
+
+"The difficulty really is that he's a person with so many ideas that
+it's particularly hard to simplify for him. That's exactly of course
+what Aunt Maud has been trying. He won't," Kate firmly continued, "make
+up his mind about me."
+
+"Well," Milly smiled, "give him time."
+
+Her friend met it in perfection. "One is _doing_ that--one _is._ But
+one remains, all the same, but one of his ideas."
+
+"There's no harm in that," Milly returned, "if you come out in the end
+as the best of them. What's a man," she pursued, "especially an
+ambitious one, without a variety of ideas?"
+
+"No doubt. The more the merrier." And Kate looked at her grandly. "One
+can but hope to come out, and do nothing to prevent it."
+
+All of which made for the impression, fantastic or not, of the _alibi._
+The splendour, the grandeur were, for Milly, the bold ironic spirit
+behind it, so interesting too in itself. What, moreover, was not less
+interesting was the fact, as our young woman noted it, that Kate
+confined her point to the difficulties, so far as _she_ was concerned,
+raised only by Lord Mark. She referred now to none that her own taste
+might present; which circumstance again played its little part. She was
+doing what she liked in respect to another person, but she was in no
+way committed to the other person, and her furthermore talking of Lord
+Mark as not young and not true were only the signs of her clear
+self-consciousness, were all in the line of her slightly hard, but
+scarce the less graceful extravagance. She didn't wish to show too much
+her consent to be arranged for, but that was a different thing from not
+wishing sufficiently to give it. There was something moreover, on it
+all, that Milly still found occasion to say, "If your aunt has been, as
+you tell me, put out by me, I feel that she has remained remarkably
+kind."
+
+"Oh, but she has--whatever might have happened in that respect--plenty
+of use for you! You put her in, my dear, more than you put her out. You
+don't half see it, but she has clutched your petticoat. You can do
+anything--you can do, I mean, lots that _we_ can't. You're an outsider,
+independent and standing by yourself; you're not hideously relative to
+tiers and tiers of others." And Kate, facing in that direction, went
+further and further; wound up, while Milly gaped, with extraordinary
+words. "We're of no use to you--it's decent to tell you. You'd be of
+use to us, but that's a different matter. My honest advice to you would
+be--" she went indeed all lengths--"to drop us while you can. It would
+be funny if you didn't soon see how awfully better you can do. We've
+not really done for you the least thing worth speaking of--nothing you
+mightn't easily have had in some other way. Therefore you're under no
+obligation. You won't want us next year; we shall only continue to want
+_you._ But that's no reason for you, and you mustn't pay too dreadfully
+for poor Mrs. Stringham's having let you in. She has the best
+conscience in the world; she's enchanted with what she has done; but
+you shouldn't take your people from _her._ It has been quite awful to
+see you do it."
+
+Milly tried to be amused, so as not--it was too absurd--to be fairly
+frightened. Strange enough indeed--if not natural enough--that, late at
+night thus, in a mere mercenary house, with Susie away, a want of
+confidence should possess her. She recalled, with all the rest of it,
+the next day, piecing things together in the dawn, that she had felt
+herself alone with a creature who paced like a panther. That was a
+violent image, but it made her a little less ashamed of having been
+scared. For all her scare, none the less, she had now the sense to find
+words. "And yet without Susie I shouldn't have had you."
+
+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; and, though a small solemnity
+of reproach, a sombre strain, had broken into her tone, it was to
+figure as her nearest approach to serving Mrs. Lowder. "Why do you say
+such things to me?"
+
+This unexpectedly had acted, by a sudden turn of Kate's attitude, as a
+happy speech. 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; partly as if, though a dove who could perch on a
+finger, one were also a princess with whom forms were to be observed.
+It even came to her, through the touch of her companion's lips, that
+this form, this cool pressure, fairly sealed the sense of what Kate had
+just said. It was moreover, for the girl, like an inspiration: she
+found herself accepting as the right one, while she caught her breath
+with relief, the name so given her. 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. Lowder, with
+Susan--which she needn't have done, at that hour, instead of letting
+Kate come down to her; so that Milly could be quite sure it was to
+catch hold, in some way, of the loose end they had left. Well, the way
+she did catch was simply to make the point that it didn't now in the
+least matter. She had mounted the stairs for this, and she had her
+moment again with her younger hostess while Kate, on the spot, as the
+latter at the time noted, gave Susan Shepherd unwonted opportunities.
+Kate was in other words, as Aunt Maud engaged her friend, listening
+with the handsomest response to Mrs. Stringham's impression of the
+scene they had just quitted. It was in the tone of the fondest
+indulgence--almost, really, that of dove cooing to dove--that Mrs.
+Lowder expressed to Milly the hope that it had all gone beautifully.
+Her "all" had an ample benevolence; it soothed and simplified; she
+spoke as if it were the two young women, not she and her comrade, who
+had been facing the town together. But Milly's answer had prepared
+itself while Aunt Maud was on the stair; she had felt in a rush all the
+reasons that would make it the most dovelike; and she gave it, while
+she was about it, as earnest, as candid. "I don't _think,_ dear lady,
+he's here."
+
+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: she studied again the dovelike and so
+set her companion to mere rich reporting that she averted all inquiry
+into her own case.
+
+That, with the new day, was once more her law--though she saw before
+her, of course, as something of a complication, her need, each time, to
+decide. She should have to be clear as to how a dove _would_ act. She
+settled it, she thought, well enough this morning by quite readopting
+her plan in respect to Sir Luke Strett. That, she was pleased to
+reflect, had originally been pitched in the key of a merely iridescent
+drab; and although Mrs. Stringham, after breakfast, began by staring at
+it as if it had been a priceless Persian carpet suddenly unrolled at
+her feet, she had no scruple, at the end of five minutes, in leaving
+her to make the best of it. "Sir Luke Strett comes, by appointment, to
+see me at eleven, but I'm going out on purpose. He's to be told,
+please, deceptively, that I'm at home, and, you, as my representative,
+when he comes up, are to see him instead. He will like that, this time,
+better. So do be nice to him." It had taken, naturally, more
+explanation, and the mention, above all, of the fact that the visitor
+was the greatest of doctors; yet when once the key had been offered
+Susie slipped it on her bunch, and her young friend could again feel
+her lovely imagination operate. It operated in truth very much as Mrs.
+Lowder's, at the last, had done the night before: it made the air heavy
+once more with the extravagance of assent. It might, afresh, almost
+have frightened our young woman to see how people rushed to meet her:
+_had_ she then so little time to live that the road must always be
+spared her? It was as if they were helping her to take it out on the
+spot. Susie--she couldn't deny, and didn't pretend to--might, of a
+truth, on _her_ side, have treated such news as a flash merely lurid;
+as to which, to do Susie justice, the pain of it was all there. But,
+none the less, the margin always allowed her young friend was all there
+as well; and the proposal now made her what was it in short but
+Byzantine? The vision of Milly's perception of the propriety of the
+matter had, at any rate, quickly engulfed, so far as her attitude was
+concerned, any surprise and any shock; so that she only desired, the
+next thing, perfectly to possess the facts. Milly could easily speak,
+on this, as if there were only one: she made nothing of such another as
+that she had felt herself menaced. The great fact, in fine, was that
+she _knew_ him to desire just now, more than anything else, to meet,
+quite apart, some one interested in her. Who therefore so interested as
+her faithful Susan? The only other circumstance that, by the time she
+had quitted her friend, she had treated as worth mentioning was the
+circumstance of her having at first intended to keep quiet. She had
+originally best seen herself as sweetly secretive. As to that she had
+changed, and her present request was the result. She didn't say why she
+had changed, but she trusted her faithful Susan. Their visitor would
+trust her not less, and she herself would adore their visitor. Moreover
+he wouldn't--the girl felt sure--tell her anything dreadful. The worst
+would be that he was in love and that he needed a confidant to work it.
+And now she was going to the National Gallery.
+
+
+XVI
+
+The idea of the National Gallery had been with her from the moment of
+her hearing from Sir Luke Strett about his hour of coming. It had been
+in her mind as a place so meagrely visited, as one of the places that
+had seemed at home one of the attractions of Europe and one of its
+highest aids to culture, but that--the old story--the typical frivolous
+always ended by sacrificing to vulgar pleasures. She had had perfectly,
+at those whimsical moments on the Brünig, the half-shamed sense of
+turning her back on such opportunities for real improvement as had
+figured to her, from of old, in connection with the continental tour,
+under the general head of "pictures and things"; and now she knew for
+what she had done so. The plea had been explicit--she had done so for
+life, as opposed to learning; the upshot of which had been that life
+was now beautifully provided for. In spite of those few dips and dashes
+into the many-coloured stream of history for which of late Kate Croy
+had helped her to find time, there were possible great chances she had
+neglected, possible great moments she should, save for to-day, have all
+but missed. She might still, she had felt, overtake one or two of them
+among the Titians and the Turners; she had been honestly nursing the
+hour, and, once she was in the benignant halls, her faith knew itself
+justified. It was the air she wanted and the world she would now
+exclusively choose; the quiet chambers, nobly overwhelming, rich but
+slightly veiled, opened out round her and made her presently say "If I
+could lose myself _here!"_ There were people, people in plenty, but,
+admirably, no personal question. It was immense, outside, the personal
+question; but she had blissfully left it outside, and the nearest it
+came, for a quarter of an hour, to glimmering again into sight was when
+she watched for a little one of the more earnest of the lady-copyists.
+Two or three in particular, spectacled, aproned, absorbed, engaged her
+sympathy to an absurd extent, seemed to show her for the time the right
+way to live. She should have been a lady copyist--it met so the case.
+The case was the case of escape, of living under water, of being at
+once impersonal and firm. There it was before one--one had only to
+stick and stick.
+
+Milly yielded to this charm till she was almost ashamed; she watched
+the lady-copyists till she found herself wondering what would be
+thought by others of a young woman, of adequate aspect, who should
+appear to regard them as the pride of the place. She would have liked
+to talk to them, to get, as it figured to her, into their lives, and
+was deterred but by the fact that she didn't quite see herself as
+purchasing imitations and yet feared she might excite the expectation
+of purchase. She really knew before long that what held her was the
+mere refuge, that something within her was after all too weak for the
+Turners and Titians. They joined hands about her in a circle too vast,
+though a circle that a year before she would only have desired to
+trace. They were truly for the larger, not for the smaller life, the
+life of which the actual pitch, for example, was an interest, the
+interest of compassion, in misguided efforts. She marked absurdly her
+little stations, blinking, in her shrinkage of curiosity, at the
+glorious walls, yet keeping an eye on vistas and approaches, so that
+she shouldn't be flagrantly caught. The vistas and approaches drew her
+in this way from room to room, and she had been through many parts of
+the show, as she supposed, when she sat down to rest. There were chairs
+in scant clusters, places from which one could gaze. Milly indeed at
+present fixed her eyes more than elsewhere on the appearance, first,
+that she couldn't quite, after all, have accounted to an examiner for
+the order of her "schools," and then on that of her being more tired
+than she had meant, in spite of her having been so much less
+intelligent. They found, her eyes, it should be added, other occupation
+as well, which she let them freely follow: they rested largely, in her
+vagueness, on the vagueness of other visitors; they attached themselves
+in especial, with mixed results, to the surprising stream of her
+compatriots. She was struck with the circumstance that the great
+museum, early in August, was haunted with these pilgrims, as also with
+that of her knowing them from afar, marking them easily, each and all,
+and recognising not less promptly that they had ever new lights for
+her--new lights on their own darkness. She gave herself up at last, and
+it was a consummation like another: what she should have come to the
+National Gallery for to-day would be to watch the copyists and reckon
+the Baedekers. That perhaps was the moral of a menaced state of
+health--that one would sit in public places and count the Americans. It
+passed the time in a manner; but it seemed already the second line of
+defence, and this notwithstanding the pattern, so unmistakable, of her
+country-folk. They were cut out as by scissors, coloured, labelled,
+mounted; but their relation to her failed to act--they somehow did
+nothing for her. Partly, no doubt, they didn't so much as notice or
+know her, didn't even recognise their community of collapse with her,
+the sign on her, as she sat there, that for her too Europe was "tough."
+It came to her idly thus--for her humour could still play--that she
+didn't seem then the same success with them as with the inhabitants of
+London, who had taken her up on scarce more of an acquaintance. She
+could wonder if they would be different should she go back with that
+glamour attached; and she could also wonder, if it came to that,
+whether she should ever go back. Her friends straggled past, at any
+rate, in all the vividness of their absent criticism, and she had even
+at last the sense of taking a mean advantage. There was a finer
+instant, however, at which three ladies, clearly a mother and
+daughters, had paused before her under compulsion of a comment
+apparently just uttered by one of them and referring to some object on
+the other side of the room. Milly had her back to the object, but her
+face very much to her young compatriot, the one who had spoken and in
+whose look she perceived a certain gloom of recognition. Recognition,
+for that matter, sat confessedly in her own eyes: she _knew_ the three,
+generically, as easily as a schoolboy with a crib in his lap would know
+the answer in class; she felt, like the schoolboy, guilty
+enough--questioned, as honour went, as to her right so to possess, to
+dispossess, people who hadn't consciously provoked her. She would have
+been able to say where they lived, and how, had the place and the way
+been but amenable to the positive; she bent tenderly, in imagination,
+over marital, paternal Mr. Whatever-he-was, at home, eternally named,
+with all the honours and placidities, but eternally unseen and existing
+only as some one who could be financially heard from. The mother, the
+puffed and composed whiteness of whose hair had no relation to her
+apparent age, showed a countenance almost chemically clean and dry; her
+companions wore an air of vague resentment humanised by fatigue; and
+the three were equally adorned with short cloaks of coloured cloth
+surmounted by little tartan hoods. The tartans were doubtless
+conceivable as different, but the cloaks, curiously, only thinkable as
+one. "Handsome? Well, if you choose to say so." It was the mother who
+had spoken, who herself added, after a pause during which Milly took
+the reference as to a picture: "In the English style." The three pair
+of eyes had converged, and their possessors had for an instant rested,
+with the effect of a drop of the subject, on this last
+characterisation--with that, too, of a gloom not less mute in one of
+the daughters than murmured in the other. Milly's heart went out to
+them while they turned their backs; she said to herself that they ought
+to have known her, that there was something between them they might
+have beautifully put together. But she had lost _them_ also--they were
+cold; they left her in her weak wonder as to what they had been looking
+at. The "handsome" disposed her to turn--all the more that the "English
+style" would be the English school, which she liked; only she saw,
+before moving, by the array on the side facing her, that she was in
+fact among small Dutch pictures. The action of this was again
+appreciable--the dim surmise that it wouldn't then be by a picture that
+the spring in the three ladies had been pressed. It was at all events
+time she should go, and she turned as she got on her feet. She had had
+behind her one of the entrances and various visitors who had come in
+while she sat, visitors single and in pairs--by one of the former of
+whom she felt her eyes suddenly held.
+
+This was a gentleman in the middle of the place, a gentleman who had
+removed his hat and was for a moment, while he glanced, absently, as
+she could see, at the top tier of the collection, tapping his forehead
+with his pocket-handkerchief. The occupation held him long enough to
+give Milly time to take for granted--and a few seconds sufficed--that
+his face was the object just observed by her friends. This could only
+have been because she concurred in their tribute, even qualified, and
+indeed "the English style" of the gentleman--perhaps by instant
+contrast to the American--was what had had the arresting power. This
+arresting power, at the same time--and that was the marvel--had already
+sharpened almost to pain, for in the very act of judging the bared head
+with detachment she felt herself shaken by a knowledge of it. It was
+Merton Densher's own, and he was standing there, standing long enough
+unconscious for her to fix him and then hesitate. These successions
+were swift, so that she could still ask herself in freedom if she had
+best let him see her. She could still reply to that that she shouldn't
+like him to catch her in the effort to prevent this; and she might
+further have decided that he was too preoccupied to see anything had
+not a perception intervened that surpassed the first in violence. She
+was unable to think afterwards how long she had looked at him before
+knowing herself as otherwise looked at; all she was coherently to put
+together was that she had had a second recognition without his having
+noticed her. The source of this latter shock was nobody less than Kate
+Croy--Kate Croy who was suddenly also in the line of vision and whose
+eyes met her eyes at their next movement. Kate was but two yards
+off--Mr. Densher wasn't alone. Kate's face specifically said so, for
+after a stare as blank at first as Milly's it broke into a far smile.
+That was what, wonderfully--in addition to the marvel of their
+meeting--passed from her for Milly; the instant reduction to easy terms
+of the fact of their being there, the two young women, together. It was
+perhaps only afterwards that the girl fully felt the connection between
+this touch and her already established conviction that Kate was a
+prodigious person; yet on the spot she none the less, in a degree, knew
+herself handled and again, as she had been the night before, dealt
+with--absolutely even dealt with for her greater pleasure. A minute in
+fine hadn't elapsed before Kate had somehow made her provisionally take
+everything as natural. The provisional was just the charm--acquiring
+that character from one moment to the other; it represented happily so
+much that Kate would explain on the very first chance. This left
+moreover--and that was the greatest wonder--all due margin for
+amusement at the way things happened, the monstrous oddity of their
+turning up in such a place on the very heels of their having separated
+without allusion to it. The handsome girl was thus literally in control
+of the scene by the time Merton Densher was ready to exclaim with a
+high flush, or a vivid blush--one didn't distinguish the embarrassment
+from the joy--"Why, Miss Theale: fancy!" and "Why, Miss Theale: what
+luck!"
+
+Miss Theale had meanwhile the sense that for him too, on Kate's part,
+something wonderful and unspoken was determinant; and this although,
+distinctly, his companion had no more looked at him with a hint than he
+had looked at her with a question. He had looked and he was looking
+only at Milly herself, ever so pleasantly and considerately--she scarce
+knew what to call it; but without prejudice to her consciousness, all
+the same, that women got out of predicaments better than men. The
+predicament of course wasn't definite or phraseable--and the way they
+let all phrasing pass was presently to recur to our young woman as a
+characteristic triumph of the civilised state; but she took it for
+granted, insistently, with a small private flare of passion, because
+the one thing she could think of to do for him was to show him how she
+eased him off. She would really, tired and nervous, have been much
+disconcerted, were it not that the opportunity in question had saved
+her. It was what had saved her most, what had made her, after the first
+few seconds, almost as brave for Kate as Kate was for her, had made her
+only ask herself what their friend would like of her. That he was at
+the end of three minutes, without the least complicated reference, so
+smoothly "their" friend was just the effect of their all being
+sublimely civilised. The flash in which he saw this was, for Milly,
+fairly inspiring--to that degree in fact that she was even now, on such
+a plane, yearning to be supreme. It took, no doubt, a big dose of
+inspiration to treat as not funny--or at least as not unpleasant--the
+anomaly, for Kate, that _she_ knew their gentleman, and for herself,
+that Kate was spending the morning with him; but everything continued
+to make for this after Milly had tasted of her draught. She was to
+wonder in subsequent reflection what in the world they had actually
+said, since they had made such a success of what they didn't say; the
+sweetness of the draught for the time, at any rate, was to feel success
+assured. What depended on this for Mr. Densher was all obscurity to
+her, and she perhaps but invented the image of his need as a short cut
+to service. Whatever were the facts, their perfect manners, all round,
+saw them through. The finest part of Milly's own inspiration, it may
+further be mentioned, was the quick perception that what would be of
+most service was, so to speak, her own native wood-note. She had long
+been conscious with shame for her thin blood, or at least for her poor
+economy, of her unused margin as an American girl--closely indeed as,
+in English air, the text might appear to cover the page. She still had
+reserves of spontaneity, if not of comicality; so that all this cash in
+hand could now find employment. She became as spontaneous as possible
+and as American as it might conveniently appeal to Mr. Densher, after
+his travels, to find her. She said things in the air, and yet flattered
+herself that she struck him as saying them not in the tone of agitation
+but in the tone of New York. In the tone of New York agitation was
+beautifully discounted, and she had now a sufficient view of how much
+it might accordingly help her.
+
+The help was fairly rendered before they left the place; when her
+friends presently accepted her invitation to adjourn with her to
+luncheon at her hotel, it was in the Fifth Avenue that the meal might
+have waited. Kate had never been there so straight, but Milly was at
+present taking her; and if Mr. Densher had been he had at least never
+had to come so fast. She proposed it as the natural thing--proposed it
+as the American girl; and she saw herself quickly justified by the pace
+at which she was followed. The beauty of the case was that to do it all
+she had only to appear to take Kate's hint. This had said, in its fine
+first smile, "Oh yes, our look is queer--but give me time;" and the
+American girl could give time as nobody else could. What Milly thus
+gave she therefore made them take--even if, as they might surmise, it
+was rather more than they wanted. In the porch of the museum she
+expressed her preference for a four-wheeler; they would take their
+course in that guise precisely to multiply the minutes. She was more
+than ever justified by the positive charm that her spirit imparted even
+to their use of this conveyance; and she touched her highest
+point--that is, certainly, for herself--as she ushered her companions
+into the presence of Susie. Susie was there with luncheon, with her
+return, in prospect; and nothing could now have filled her own
+consciousness more to the brim than to see this good friend take in how
+little she was abjectly anxious. The cup itself actually offered to
+this good friend might in truth well be startling, for it was composed
+beyond question of ingredients oddly mixed. She caught Susie fairly
+looking at her as if to know whether she had brought in guests to hear
+Sir Luke Strett's report. Well, it was better her companion should have
+too much than too little to wonder about; she had come out "anyway," as
+they said at home, for the interest of the thing; and interest truly
+sat in her eyes. Milly was none the less, at the sharpest crisis, a
+little sorry for her; she could of necessity extract from the odd scene
+so comparatively little of a soothing secret. She saw Mr. Densher
+suddenly popping up, but she saw nothing else that had happened. She
+saw in the same way her young friend indifferent to her young friend's
+doom, and she lacked what would explain it. The only thing to keep her
+in patience was the way, after luncheon, Kate almost, as might be said,
+made up to her. This was actually perhaps as well what most kept Milly
+herself in patience. It had in fact for our young woman a positive
+beauty--was so marked as a deviation from the handsome girl's previous
+courses. Susie had been a bore to the handsome girl, and the change was
+now suggestive. The two sat together, after they had risen from table,
+in the apartment in which they had lunched, making it thus easy for the
+other guest and his entertainer to sit in the room adjacent. This, for
+the latter personage, was the beauty; it was almost, on Kate's part,
+like a prayer to be relieved. If she honestly liked better to be
+"thrown with" Susan Shepherd than with their other friend, why that
+said practically everything. It didn't perhaps altogether say why she
+had gone out with him for the morning, but it said, as one thought,
+about as much as she could say to his face.
+
+Little by little indeed, under the vividness of Kate's behaviour, the
+probabilities fell back into their order. Merton Densher was in love,
+and Kate couldn't help it--could only be sorry and kind: wouldn't that,
+without wild flurries, cover everything? Milly at all events tried it
+as a cover, tried it hard, for the time; pulled it over her, in the
+front, the larger room, drew it up to her chin with energy. If it
+didn't, so treated, do everything for her, it did so much that she
+could herself supply the rest. She made that up by the interest of her
+great question, the question of whether, seeing him once more, with all
+that, as she called it to herself, had come and gone, her impression of
+him would be different from the impression received in New York. That
+had held her from the moment of their leaving the museum; it kept her
+company through their drive and during luncheon; and now that she was a
+quarter of an hour alone with him it became acute. She was to feel at
+this crisis that no clear, no common answer, no direct satisfaction on
+this point, was to reach her; she was to see her question itself simply
+go to pieces. She couldn't tell if he were different or not, and she
+didn't know nor care if _she_ were: these things had ceased to matter
+in the light of the only thing she did know. This was that she liked
+him, as she put it to herself, as much as ever; and if that were to
+amount to liking a new person the amusement would be but the greater.
+She had thought him at first very quiet, in spite of recovery from his
+original confusion; though even the shade of bewilderment, she yet
+perceived, had not been due to such vagueness on the subject of her
+reintensified identity as the probable sight, over there, of many
+thousands of her kind would sufficiently have justified. No, he was
+quiet, inevitably, for the first half of the time, because Milly's own
+lively line--the line of spontaneity--made everything else relative;
+and because too, so far as Kate was spontaneous, it was ever so finely
+in the air among them that the normal pitch must be kept. Afterwards,
+when they had got a little more used, as it were, to each other's
+separate felicity, he had begun to talk more, clearly bethought
+himself, at a given moment, of what _his_ natural lively line would be.
+It would be to take for granted she must wish to hear of the States,
+and to give her, in its order, everything he had seen and done there.
+He abounded, of a sudden he almost insisted; he returned, after breaks,
+to the charge; and the effect was perhaps the more odd as he gave no
+clue whatever to what he had admired, as he went, or to what he hadn't.
+He simply drenched her with his sociable story--especially during the
+time they were away from the others. She had stopped then being
+American--all to let him be English; a permission of which he took, she
+could feel, both immense and unconscious advantage. She had really
+never cared less for the "States" than at this moment; but that had
+nothing to do with the matter. It would have been the occasion of her
+life to learn about them, for nothing could put him off, and he
+ventured on no reference to what had happened for herself. It might
+have been almost as if he had known that the greatest of all these
+adventures was her doing just what she did then.
+
+It was at this point that she saw the smash of her great question as
+complete, saw that all she had to do with was the sense of being there
+with him. And there was no chill for this in what she also presently
+saw--that, however he had begun, he was now acting from a particular
+desire, determined either by new facts or new fancies, to be like
+everyone else, simplifyingly "kind" to her. He had caught on already as
+to manner--fallen into line with everyone else; and if his spirits
+verily _had_ gone up it might well be that he had thus felt himself
+lighting on the remedy for all awkwardness. Whatever he did or he
+didn't, Milly knew she should still like him--there was no alternative
+to that; but her heart could none the less sink a little on feeling how
+much his view of her was destined to have in common with--as she now
+sighed over it--_the_ view. She could have dreamed of his not having
+_the_ view, of his having something or other, if need be quite
+viewless, of his own; but he might have what he could with least
+trouble, and _the_ view wouldn't be, after all, a positive bar to her
+seeing him. The defect of it in general--if she might so ungraciously
+criticise--was that, by its sweet universality, it made relations
+rather prosaically a matter of course. It anticipated and superseded
+the--likewise sweet--operation of real affinities. It was this that was
+doubtless marked in her power to keep him now--this and her glassy
+lustre of attention to his pleasantness about the scenery in the
+Rockies. She was in truth a little measuring her success in detaining
+him by Kate's success in "standing" Susan. It would not be, if she
+could help it, Mr. Densher who should first break down. Such at least
+was one of the forms of the girl's inward tension; but beneath even
+this deep reason was a motive still finer. What she had left at home on
+going out to give it a chance was meanwhile still, was more sharply and
+actively, there. What had been at the top of her mind about it and then
+been violently pushed down--this quantity was again working up. As soon
+as their friends should go Susie would break out, and what she would
+break out upon wouldn't be--interested in that gentleman as she had
+more than once shown herself--the personal fact of Mr. Densher. Milly
+had found in her face at luncheon a feverish glitter, and it told what
+she was full of. She didn't care now for Mr. Densher's personal fact.
+Mr. Densher had risen before her only to find his proper place in her
+imagination already, of a sudden, occupied. His personal fact failed,
+so far as she was concerned, to be personal, and her companion noted
+the failure. This could only mean that she was full to the brim, of Sir
+Luke Strett, and of what she had had from him. What _had_ she had from
+him? It was indeed now working upward again that Milly would do well to
+know, though knowledge looked stiff in the light of Susie's glitter. It
+was therefore, on the whole, because Densher's young hostess was
+divided from it by so thin a partition that she continued to cling to
+the Rockies.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2, by
+Henry James
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+Project Gutenberg's The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2, by Henry James
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Release Date: July 19, 2009 [EBook #29452]
+[Last updated: October 12, 2022]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WINGS OF THE DOVE, VOL 1 OF 2 ***
+
+
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+Produced by James Adcock. Special thanks to The Internet
+Archive: American Libraries, and Project Gutenberg Australia
+
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+</pre>
+
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h1 align="center">THE WINGS OF THE DOVE</h1>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h3 align="center">BY</h3>
+<h2 align="center">HENRY JAMES</h2>
+
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h3 align="center">VOLUME I</h3>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h3 align="center">NEW YORK</h3>
+<h2 align="center">CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS</h2>
+
+<h3 align="center">1902</h3>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h5 align="center">Copyright, 1902, by</h5>
+<h5 align="center">CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS</h5>
+<h3 align="center">&mdash;&mdash;</h3>
+<h5 align="center">Published, August, 1902</h5>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h5 align="center">TROW DIRECTORY</h5>
+<h5 align="center">PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY</h5>
+<h5 align="center">NEW YORK</h5>
+<br><br>
+<br><br>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">BOOK FIRST</h2>
+<br><br>
+<br><br>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">THE WINGS OF THE DOVE</h2>
+<br>
+<br>
+<h2 align="center">I</h2>
+<br>
+<br>
+<p>
+She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come
+in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there
+were moments at which she showed herself, in the
+glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with
+the irritation that had brought her to the point of
+going away without sight of him. It was at this
+point, however, that she remained; changing her
+place, moving from the shabby sofa to the armchair
+upholstered in a glazed cloth that gave at
+once&mdash;she had tried it&mdash;the sense of the slippery and
+of the sticky. She had looked at the sallow prints
+on the walls and at the lonely magazine, a year old,
+that combined, with a small lamp in coloured glass
+and a knitted white centre-piece wanting in freshness,
+to enhance the effect of the purplish cloth on
+the principal table; she had above all, from time to
+time, taken a brief stand on the small balcony to
+which the pair of long windows gave access. The
+vulgar little street, in this view, offered scant relief
+from the vulgar little room; its main office was to
+suggest to her that the narrow black house-fronts,
+adjusted to a standard that would have been low
+even for backs, constituted quite the publicity implied
+by such privacies. One felt them in the room
+exactly as one felt the room&mdash;the hundred like it
+or worse&mdash;in the street. Each time she turned in
+again, each time, in her impatience, she gave him
+up, it was to sound to a deeper depth, while she
+tasted the faint, flat emanation of things, the failure
+of fortune and of honour. If she continued to wait
+it was really, in a manner, that she might not add
+the shame of fear, of individual, personal collapse,
+to all the other shames. To feel the street, to feel
+the room, to feel the table-cloth and the centre-piece
+and the lamp, gave her a small, salutary sense, at
+least, of neither shirking nor lying. This whole
+vision was the worst thing yet&mdash;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?
+</p><p>
+Her father's life, her sister's, her own, that of
+her two lost brothers&mdash;the whole history of their
+house had the effect of some fine florid, voluminous
+phrase, say even a musical, that dropped first into
+words, into notes, without sense, and then, hanging
+unfinished, into no words, no notes at all. Why
+should a set of people have been put in motion, on
+such a scale and with such an air of being equipped
+for a profitable journey, only to break down without
+an accident, to stretch themselves in the wayside
+dust without a reason? The answer to these questions
+was not in Chirk Street, but the questions themselves
+bristled there, and the girl's repeated pause
+before the mirror and the chimney-place might
+have represented her nearest approach to an escape
+from them. Was it not in fact the partial escape
+from this "worst" in which she was steeped to be
+able to make herself out again as agreeable to see?
+She stared into the tarnished glass too hard indeed
+to be staring at her beauty alone. She readjusted
+the poise of her black, closely-feathered hat; retouched,
+beneath it, the thick fall of her dusky hair;
+kept her eyes, aslant, no less on her beautiful averted
+than on her beautiful presented oval. She was
+dressed altogether in black, which gave an even
+tone, by contrast, to her clear face and made her
+hair more harmoniously dark. Outside, on the balcony,
+her eyes showed as blue; within, at the mirror,
+they showed almost as black. She was handsome,
+but the degree of it was not sustained by
+items and aids; 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&mdash;she counted singularly for its pleasure.
+More "dressed," often, with fewer accessories, than
+other women, or less dressed, should occasion require,
+with more, she probably could not have given
+the key to these felicities. They were mysteries of
+which her friends were conscious&mdash;those friends
+whose general explanation was to say that she was
+clever, whether or no it were taken by the world as
+the cause or as the effect of her charm. If she saw
+more things than her fine face in the dull glass of
+her father's lodgings, she might have seen that, after
+all, she was not herself a fact in the collapse. She
+didn't judge herself cheap, she didn't make for
+misery. Personally, at least, she was not chalk-marked
+for the auction. She hadn't given up yet,
+and the broken sentence, if she was the last word,
+would end with a sort of meaning. There was a
+minute during which, though her eyes were fixed,
+she quite visibly lost herself in the thought of the
+way she might still pull things round had she only
+been a man. It was the name, above all, she would
+take in hand&mdash;the precious name she so liked and
+that, in spite of the harm her wretched father had
+done it, was not yet past praying for. She loved it
+in fact the more tenderly for that bleeding wound.
+But what could a penniless girl do with it but let
+it go?
+</p><p>
+When her father at last appeared she became, as
+usual, instantly aware of the futility of any effort
+to hold him to anything. He had written her that
+he was ill, too ill to leave his room, and that he
+must see her without delay; and if this had been,
+as was probable, the sketch of a design, he was indifferent
+even to the moderate finish required for
+deception. He had clearly wanted, for perversities
+that he called reasons, to see her, just as she herself
+had sharpened for a talk; but she now again felt, in
+the inevitability of the freedom he used with her,
+all the old ache, her poor mother's very own, that
+he couldn't touch you ever so lightly without setting
+up. No relation with him could be so short
+or so superficial as not to be somehow to your hurt;
+and this, in the strangest way in the world, not
+because he desired it to be&mdash;feeling often, as he
+surely must, the profit for him of its not being&mdash;but
+because there was never a mistake for you that
+he could leave unmade or a conviction of his impossibility
+in you that he could approach you without
+strengthening. He might have awaited her on
+the sofa in his sitting-room, or might have stayed
+in bed and received her in that situation. She was
+glad to be spared the sight of such <i>penetralia,</i> but
+it would have reminded her a little less that there
+was no truth in him. 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&mdash;as always happens in
+such cases&mdash;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.
+Just so he even might die, but Kate fairly wondered
+on what evidence of his own she would some day
+have to believe it.
+</p><p>
+He had not at present come down from his room,
+which she knew to be above the one they were in:
+he had already been out of the house, though he
+would either, should she challenge him, deny it or
+present it as a proof of his extremity. She had,
+however, by this time, quite ceased to challenge him;
+not only, face to face with him, vain irritation
+dropped, but he breathed upon the tragic consciousness
+in such a way that after a moment nothing of
+it was left. The difficulty was not less that he
+breathed in the same way upon the comic: she almost
+believed that with this latter she might still
+have found a foothold for clinging to him. He had
+ceased to be amusing&mdash;he was really too inhuman.
+His perfect look, which had floated him so long, was
+practically perfect still; but one had long since for
+every occasion taken it for granted. Nothing could
+have better shown than the actual how right one
+had been. He looked exactly as much as usual&mdash;all
+pink and silver as to skin and hair, all straitness
+and starch as to figure and dress&mdash;the man in
+the world least connected with anything unpleasant.
+He was so particularly the English gentleman and
+the fortunate, settled, normal person. Seen at a
+foreign <i>table d'hôte,</i> he suggested but one thing:
+"In what perfection England produces them!" He
+had kind, safe eyes, and a voice which, for all its
+clean fulness, told, in a manner, the happy history
+of its having never had once to raise itself. Life
+had met him so, half-way, 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!"&mdash;those
+who knew him better said, "How <i>does</i> 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. For a minute after he came
+in it was as if the place were her own and he the visitor
+with susceptibilities. He gave you funny feelings,
+he had indescribable arts, that quite turned the
+tables: that had been always how he came to see
+her mother so long as her mother would see him.
+He came from places they had often not known
+about, but he patronised Lexham Gardens. Kate's
+only actual expression of impatience, however, was
+"I'm glad you're so much better!"
+</p><p>
+"I'm not so much better, my dear&mdash;I'm exceedingly
+unwell; the proof of which is, precisely, that
+I've been out to the chemist's&mdash;that beastly fellow
+at the corner." So Mr. Croy showed he could
+qualify the humble hand that assuaged him. "I'm
+taking something he has made up for me. It's just
+why I've sent for you&mdash;that you may see me as I
+really am."
+</p><p>
+"Oh papa, it's long since I've ceased to see you
+otherwise than as you really are! I think we've
+all arrived by this time at the right word for that:
+'You're beautiful&mdash;<i>n'en parlons plus.'</i> You're as
+beautiful as ever&mdash;you look lovely." He judged
+meanwhile her own appearance, as she knew she
+could always trust him to do; recognising, estimating,
+sometimes disapproving, what she wore, showing
+her the interest he continued to take in her. He
+might really take none at all, yet she virtually knew
+herself the creature in the world to whom he was
+least indifferent. She had often enough wondered
+what on earth, at the pass he had reached, could
+give him pleasure, and she had come back, on these
+occasions, to that. It gave him pleasure that she
+was handsome, that she was, in her way, a sensible
+value. It was at least as marked, nevertheless, that
+he derived none from similar conditions, so far as
+they <i>were</i> similar, in his other child. Poor Marian
+might be handsome, but he certainly didn't care.
+The hitch here, of course, was that, with whatever
+beauty, her sister, widowed and almost in want, with
+four bouncing children, was not a sensible value.
+She asked him, the next thing, how long he had been
+in his actual quarters, though aware of how little
+it mattered, how little any answer he might make
+would probably have in common with the truth.
+She failed in fact to notice his answer, truthful or
+not, already occupied as she was with what she had
+on her own side to say to him. This was really what
+had made her wait&mdash;what superseded the small
+remainder of her resentment at his constant practical
+impertinence; the result of all of which was that,
+within a minute, she had brought it out. "Yes&mdash;even
+now I'm willing to go with you. I don't know
+what you may have wished to say to me, and even
+if you hadn't written you would within a day or
+two have heard from me. Things have happened,
+and I've only waited, for seeing you, till I should be
+quite sure. I <i>am</i> quite sure. I'll go with you."
+</p><p>
+It produced an effect. "Go with me where?"
+</p><p>
+"Anywhere. I'll stay with you. Even here."
+She had taken off her gloves and, as if she had
+arrived with her plan, she sat down.
+</p><p>
+Lionel Croy hung about in his disengaged way&mdash;hovered
+there as if, in consequence of her words,
+looking for a pretext to back out easily: on which
+she immediately saw she had discounted, as it
+might be called, what he had himself been preparing.
+He wished her not to come to him, still less to
+settle with him, and had sent for her to give her
+up with some style and state; a part of the beauty
+of which, however, was to have been his sacrifice
+to her own detachment. There was no style, no
+state, unless she wished to forsake him. His idea
+had accordingly been to surrender her to her wish
+with all nobleness; it had by no means been to have
+positively to keep her off. She cared, however, not
+a straw for his embarrassment&mdash;feeling how little,
+on her own part, she was moved by charity. She
+had seen him, first and last, in so many attitudes that
+she could now deprive him quite without compunction
+of the luxury of a new one. Yet she felt the
+disconcerted gasp in his tone as he said: "Oh my
+child, I can never consent to that!"
+</p><p>
+"What then are you going to do?"
+</p><p>
+"I'm turning it over," said Lionel Croy. "You
+may imagine if I'm not thinking."
+</p><p>
+"Haven't you thought then," his daughter asked,
+"of what I speak of? I mean of my being ready."
+</p><p>
+Standing before her with his hands behind him
+and his legs a little apart, he swayed slightly to and
+fro, inclined toward her as if rising on his toes. It
+had an effect of conscientious deliberation. "No.
+I haven't. I couldn't. I wouldn't." It was so respectable,
+a show that she felt afresh, and with the
+memory of their old despair, the despair at home,
+how little his appearance ever by any chance told
+about him. His plausibility had been the heaviest
+of her mother's crosses; inevitably so much more
+present to the world than whatever it was that was
+horrid&mdash;thank God they didn't really know!&mdash;that
+he had done. He had positively been, in his way,
+by the force of his particular type, a terrible husband
+not to live with; his type reflecting so invidiously
+on the woman who had found him distasteful.
+Had this thereby not kept directly present to Kate
+herself that it might, on some sides, prove no light
+thing for her to leave uncompanioned a parent with
+such a face and such a manner? Yet if there was
+much she neither knew nor dreamed of, it passed
+between them at this very moment that he was quite
+familiar with himself as the subject of such quandaries.
+If he recognised his younger daughter's
+happy aspect as a sensible value, he had from the
+first still more exactly appraised his own. The great
+wonder was not that in spite of everything his own
+had helped him; the great wonder was that it hadn't
+helped him more. However, it was, to its old,
+eternal, recurrent tune, helping him all the while;
+her drop into patience with him showed how it
+was helping him at this moment. She saw the next
+instant precisely the line he would take. "Do you
+really ask me to believe you've been making up your
+mind to that?"
+</p><p>
+She had to consider her own line. "I don't think
+I care, papa, what you believe. I never, for that
+matter, think of you as believing anything; hardly
+more," she permitted herself to add, "than I ever
+think of you as yourself believed. I don't know
+you, father, you see."
+</p><p>
+"And it's your idea that you may make that up?"
+</p><p>
+"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."
+</p><p>
+"I don't get on," Mr. Croy almost gaily replied.
+</p><p>
+His daughter took in the place again, and it might
+well have seemed odd that in so little to meet the
+eye there should be so much to show. What showed
+was the ugliness&mdash;so positive and palpable that it
+was somehow sustaining. It was a medium, a setting,
+and to that extent, after all, a dreadful sign
+of life; so that it fairly put a point into her answer.
+"Oh, I beg your pardon. You flourish."
+</p><p>
+"Do you throw it up at me again," he pleasantly
+inquired, "that I've not made away with myself?"
+</p><p>
+She treated the question as needing no reply; she
+sat there for real things. "You know how all our
+anxieties, under mamma's will, have come out. She
+had still less to leave than she feared. We don't
+know how we lived. It all makes up about two hundred
+a year for Marian, and two for me, but I give
+up a hundred to Marian."
+</p><p>
+"Oh, you weak thing!" her father kindly sighed.
+</p><p>
+"For you and me together," she went on, "the
+other hundred would do something."
+</p><p>
+"And what would do the rest?"
+</p><p>
+"Can you yourself do nothing?"
+He gave her a look; then, slipping his hands into
+his pockets and turning away, stood for a little at
+the window she had left open. She said nothing
+more&mdash;she had placed him there with that question,
+and the silence lasted a minute, broken by the call
+of an appealing costermonger, which came in with
+the mild March air, with the shabby sunshine, fearfully
+unbecoming to the room, and with the small
+homely hum of Chirk Street. Presently he moved
+nearer, but as if her question had quite dropped.
+"I don't see what has so suddenly wound you up."
+</p><p>
+"I should have thought you might perhaps guess.
+Let me at any rate tell you. Aunt Maud has made
+me a proposal. But she has also made me a condition.
+She wants to keep me."
+</p><p>
+"And what in the world else <i>could</i> she possibly
+want?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh, I don't know&mdash;many things. I'm not so
+precious a capture," the girl a little dryly explained.
+"No one has ever wanted to keep me before."
+</p><p>
+Looking always what was proper, her father
+looked now still more surprised than interested.
+"You've not had proposals?" He spoke as if that
+were incredible of Lionel Croy's daughter; as if
+indeed such an admission scarce consorted, even in
+filial intimacy, with her high spirit and general form.
+</p><p>
+"Not from rich relations. She's extremely kind
+to me, but it's time, she says, that we should understand
+each other."
+</p><p>
+Mr. Croy fully assented. "Of course it is&mdash;high
+time; and I can quite imagine what she means by
+it."
+</p><p>
+"Are you very sure?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh, perfectly. She means that she'll 'do' for
+you handsomely if you'll break off all relations with
+me. You speak of her condition. Her condition's
+of course that."
+</p><p>
+"Well then," said Kate, "it's what has wound
+me up. Here I am."
+</p><p>
+He showed with a gesture how thoroughly he
+had taken it in; after which, within a few seconds,
+he had, quite congruously, turned the situation
+about. "Do you really suppose me in a position to
+justify your throwing yourself upon me?"
+</p><p>
+She waited a little, but when she spoke it was
+clear. "Yes."
+</p><p>
+"Well then, you're a bigger fool than I should
+have ventured to suppose you."
+</p><p>
+"Why so? You live. You flourish. You
+bloom."
+</p><p>
+"Ah, how you've all always hated me!" he murmured
+with a pensive gaze again at the window.
+</p><p>
+"No one could be less of a mere cherished memory,"
+she declared as if she had not heard him.
+"You're an actual person, if there ever was one.
+We agreed just now that you're beautiful. You
+strike me, you know, as&mdash;in your own way&mdash;much
+more firm on your feet than I am. Don't put it
+to me therefore as monstrous that the fact that we
+are, after all, parent and child should at present in
+some manner count for us. My idea has been that
+it should have some effect for each of us. I don't
+at all, as I told you just now," she pursued, "make
+out your life; but whatever it is I hereby offer you
+to accept it. And, on my side, I'll do everything I
+can for you."
+</p><p>
+"I see," said Lionel Croy. Then, with the sound
+of extreme relevance, "And what <i>can</i> you?" She
+only, at this, hesitated, and he took up her silence.
+"You can describe yourself&mdash;<i>to</i> yourself&mdash;as, in a
+fine flight, giving up your aunt for me; but what
+good, I should like to know, would your fine flight
+do me?" As she still said nothing he developed a
+little. "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." She rose now, as if in sight of the
+term of her effort, in sight of the futility and the
+weariness of many things, and moved back to the
+poor little glass with which she had communed before.
+She retouched here again the poise of her hat,
+and this brought to her father's lips another remark
+in which impatience, however, had already
+been replaced by a funny flare of appreciation. "Oh,
+you're all right! Don't muddle yourself up with
+<i>me!"</i>
+</p><p>
+His daughter turned round to him. "The condition
+Aunt Maud makes is that I shall have absolutely
+nothing to do with you; never see you, nor
+speak, nor write to you, never go near you nor make
+you a sign, nor hold any sort of communication with
+you. What she requires is that you shall simply
+cease to exist for me."
+</p><p>
+He had always seemed&mdash;it was one of the marks
+of what they called the "unspeakable" in him&mdash;to
+walk a little more on his toes, as if for jauntiness,
+in the presence of offence. Nothing, however, was
+more wonderful than what he sometimes would take
+for offence, unless it might be what he sometimes
+wouldn't. He walked at any rate on his toes now.
+"A very proper requirement of your Aunt Maud,
+my dear&mdash;I don't hesitate to say it!" Yet as this,
+much as she had seen, left her silent at first from
+what might have been a sense of sickness, he had
+time to go on: "That's her condition then. But
+what are her promises? Just what does she engage
+to do? You must work it, you know."
+</p><p>
+"You mean make her feel," Kate asked after a
+moment, "how much I'm attached to you?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, what a cruel, invidious treaty it is for
+you to sign. I'm a poor old dad to make a stand
+about giving up&mdash;I quite agree. But I'm not,
+after all, quite the old dad not to get something <i>for</i>
+giving up."
+</p><p>
+"Oh, I think her idea," said Kate almost gaily
+now, "is that I shall get a great deal."
+</p><p>
+He met her with his inimitable amenity. "But
+does she give you the items?"
+</p><p>
+The girl went through the show. "More or
+less, I think. But many of them are things I dare
+say I may take for granted&mdash;things women can do
+for each other and that you wouldn't understand."
+</p><p>
+"There's nothing I understand so well, always,
+as the things I needn't! But what I want to do,
+you see," he went on, "is to put it to your conscience
+that you've an admirable opportunity; and
+that it's moreover one for which, after all, damn
+you, you've really to thank <i>me."</i>
+</p><p>
+"I confess I don't see," Kate observed, "what
+my 'conscience' has to do with it."
+</p><p>
+"Then, my dear girl, you ought simply to be
+ashamed of yourself. Do you know what you're
+a proof of, all you hard, hollow people together?"
+He put the question with a charming air of sudden
+spiritual heat. "Of the deplorably superficial morality
+of the age. The family sentiment, in our vulgarised,
+brutalised life, has gone utterly to pot.
+There was a day when a man like me&mdash;by which
+I mean a parent like me&mdash;would have been for a
+daughter like you a quite distinct value; what's
+called in the business world, I believe, an 'asset.'"
+He continued sociably to make it out. "I'm not
+talking only of what you might, with the right
+feeling do <i>for</i> me, but of what you might&mdash;it's what
+I call your opportunity&mdash;do <i>with</i> me. Unless indeed,"
+he the next moment imperturbably threw off,
+"they come a good deal to the same thing. Your
+duty as well as your chance, if you're capable of
+seeing it, is to use me. Show family feeling by
+seeing what I'm good for. If you had it as <i>I</i> have
+it you'd see I'm still good&mdash;well, for a lot of things.
+There's in fact, my dear," Mr. Croy wound up,
+"a coach-and-four to be got out of me." His
+drop, or rather his climax, failed a little of effect,
+indeed, through an undue precipitation of memory.
+Something his daughter had said came back to him.
+"You've settled to give away half your little inheritance?"
+</p><p>
+Her hesitation broke into laughter. "No&mdash;I
+haven't 'settled' anything."
+</p><p>
+"But you mean, practically, to let Marian collar
+it?" They stood there face to face, but she so denied
+herself to his challenge that he could only go
+on. "You've a view of three hundred a year for
+her in addition to what her husband left her with?
+Is <i>that,"</i> the remote progenitor of such wantonness
+audibly wondered, "your morality?"
+</p><p>
+Kate found her answer without trouble. "Is it
+your idea that I should give you everything?"
+</p><p>
+The "everything" clearly struck him&mdash;to the
+point even of determining the tone of his reply.
+"Far from it. How can you ask that when I refuse
+what you tell me you came to offer? Make of my
+idea what you can; I think I've sufficiently expressed
+it, and it's at any rate to take or to leave.
+It's the only one, I may nevertheless add; it's the
+basket with all my eggs. It's my conception, in
+short, of your duty."
+</p><p>
+The girl's tired smile watched the word as if it
+had taken on a small grotesque visibility. "You're
+wonderful on such subjects! I think I should leave
+you in no doubt," she pursued, "that if I were to
+sign my aunt's agreement I should carry it out, in
+honour, to the letter."
+</p><p>
+"Rather, my own love! It's just your honour
+that I appeal to. The only way to play the game
+<i>is</i> to play it. There's no limit to what your aunt
+can do for you."
+</p><p>
+"Do you mean in the way of marrying me?"
+</p><p>
+"What else should I mean? Marry properly&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"And then?" Kate asked as he hung fire.
+</p><p>
+"And then&mdash;well, I <i>will</i> talk with you. I'll resume
+relations."
+</p><p>
+She looked about her and picked up her parasol.
+"Because you're not so afraid of any one else in the
+world as you are of <i>her?</i> My husband, if I should
+marry, would be, at the worst, less of a terror? If
+that's what you mean, there may be something in
+it. But doesn't it depend a little also on what you
+mean by my getting a proper one? However," Kate
+added as she picked out the frill of her little umbrella,
+"I don't suppose your idea of him is <i>quite</i>
+that he should persuade you to live with us."
+</p><p>
+"Dear no&mdash;not a bit." He spoke as not resenting
+either the fear or the hope she imputed; met
+both imputations, in fact, with a sort of intellectual
+relief. "I place the case for you wholly in your
+aunt's hands. I take her view, with my eyes shut;
+I accept in all confidence any man she selects. If
+he's good enough for <i>her</i>&mdash;elephantine snob as she
+is&mdash;he's good enough for me; and quite in spite of
+the fact that she'll be sure to select one who can
+be trusted to be nasty to me. My only interest is
+in your doing what she wants. You shan't be so
+beastly poor, my darling," Mr. Croy declared, "if
+I can help it."
+</p><p>
+"Well then, good-bye, papa," the girl said after
+a reflection on this that had perceptibly ended for
+her in a renunciation of further debate. "Of
+course you understand that it may be for long."
+</p><p>
+Her companion, hereupon, had one of his finest
+inspirations. "Why not, frankly, for ever? You
+must do me the justice to see that I don't do things,
+that I've never done them, by halves&mdash;that if I
+offer you to efface myself, it's for the final, fatal
+sponge that I ask, well saturated and well applied."
+</p><p>
+She turned her handsome, quiet face upon him at
+such length that it might well have been for the
+last time. "I don't know what you're like."
+</p><p>
+"No more do I, my dear. I've spent my life in
+trying, in vain, to discover. Like nothing&mdash;more's
+the pity. If there had been many of us, and we
+could have found each other out, there's no knowing
+what we mightn't have done. But it doesn't
+matter now. Good-bye, love." He looked even not
+sure of what she would wish him to suppose on the
+subject of a kiss, yet also not embarrassed by his
+uncertainty.
+</p><p>
+She forbore in fact for a moment longer to clear
+it up. "I wish there were some one here who
+might serve&mdash;for any contingency&mdash;as a witness that
+I <i>have</i> put it to you that I'm ready to come."
+</p><p>
+"Would you like me," her father asked, "to call
+the landlady?"
+</p><p>
+"You may not believe me," she pursued, "but I
+came really hoping you might have found some way.
+I'm very sorry, at all events, to leave you unwell."
+He turned away from her, on this, and, as he had
+done before, took refuge, by the window, in a stare
+at the street. "Let me put it&mdash;unfortunately without
+a witness," she added after a moment, "that
+there's only one word you really need speak."
+</p><p>
+When he took this up it was still with his back
+to her. "If I don't strike you as having already
+spoken it, our time has been singularly wasted."
+</p><p>
+"I'll engage with you in respect to my aunt exactly
+to what she wants of me in respect to you.
+She wants me to choose. Very well, I <i>will</i> choose.
+I'll wash my hands of her for you to just that tune."
+</p><p>
+He at last brought himself round. "Do you
+know, dear, you make me sick? I've tried to be
+clear, and it isn't fair."
+</p><p>
+But she passed this over; she was too visibly sincere.
+"Father!"
+</p><p>
+"I don't quite see what's the matter with you,"
+he said, "and if you can't pull yourself together I'll&mdash;upon
+my honour&mdash;take you in hand. Put you into
+a cab and deliver you again safe at Lancaster Gate."
+</p><p>
+She was really absent, distant. "Father."
+</p><p>
+It was too much, and he met it sharply. "Well?"
+</p><p>
+"Strange as it may be to you to hear me say it,
+there's a good you can do me and a help you can
+render."
+</p><p>
+"Isn't it then exactly what I've been trying to
+make you feel?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes," she answered patiently, "but so in the
+wrong way. I'm perfectly honest in what I say,
+and I know what I'm talking about. It isn't that I'll
+pretend I could have believed a month ago in anything
+to call aid or support from you. The case is
+changed&mdash;that's what has happened; my difficulty's
+a new one. But even now it's not a question of anything
+I should ask you in a way to 'do.' It's simply
+a question of your not turning me away&mdash;taking
+yourself out of my life. It's simply a question of
+your saying: 'Yes then, since you will, we'll stand
+together. We won't worry in advance about how
+or where; we'll have a faith and find a way.' That's
+all&mdash;<i>that</i> would be the good you'd do me. I should
+<i>have</i> you, and it would be for my benefit. Do you
+see?"
+</p><p>
+If he didn't it was not for want of looking at
+her hard. "The matter with you is that you're in
+love, and that your aunt knows and&mdash;for reasons,
+I'm sure, perfect&mdash;hates and opposes it. Well she
+may! It's a matter in which I trust her with my
+eyes shut. Go, please." Though he spoke not in
+anger&mdash;rather in infinite sadness&mdash;he fairly turned
+her out. Before she took it up he had, as the fullest
+expression of what he felt, opened the door of the
+room. He had fairly, in his deep disapproval, a
+generous compassion to spare. "I'm sorry for her,
+deluded woman, if she builds on you."
+</p><p>
+Kate stood a moment in the draught. "She's not
+the person <i>I</i> pity most, for, deluded in many ways
+though she may be, she's not the person who's most
+so. I mean," she explained, "if it's a question of
+what you call building on me."
+</p><p>
+He took it as if what she meant might be other
+than her description of it. "You're deceiving <i>two</i>
+persons then, Mrs. Lowder and somebody else?"
+</p><p>
+She shook her head with detachment. "I've no
+intention of that sort with respect to any one now&mdash;to
+Mrs. Lowder least of all. If you fail me"&mdash;she
+seemed to make it out for herself&mdash;"that has the
+merit at least that it simplifies. I shall go my way&mdash;as
+I see my way."
+</p><p>
+"Your way, you mean then, will be to marry
+some blackguard without a penny?"
+</p><p>
+"You ask a great deal of satisfaction," she observed,
+"for the little you give."
+</p><p>
+It brought him up again before her as with a
+sense that she was not to be hustled; and, though
+he glared at her a little, this had long been the practical
+limit to his general power of objection. "If
+you're base enough to incur your aunt's disgust,
+you're base enough for my argument. What, if
+you're not thinking of an utterly improper person,
+do your speeches to me signify? Who <i>is</i> the beggarly
+sneak?" he demanded as her response failed.
+Her response, when it came, was cold but distinct.
+"He has every disposition to make the best
+of you. He only wants in fact to be kind to you."
+</p><p>
+"Then he <i>must</i> be an ass! And how in the world
+can you consider it to improve him for me," her
+father pursued, "that he's also destitute and impossible?
+There are asses and asses, even&mdash;the right
+and the wrong&mdash;and you appear to have carefully
+picked out one of the wrong. Your aunt knows
+<i>them,</i> by good fortune; I perfectly trust, as I tell
+you, her judgment for them; and you may take it
+from me once for all that I won't hear of any one
+of whom <i>she</i> won't." Which led up to his last word.
+"If you should really defy us both&mdash;&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"Well, papa?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, my sweet child, I think that&mdash;reduced to
+insignificance as you may fondly believe me&mdash;I
+should still not be quite without some way of making
+you regret it."
+</p><p>
+She had a pause, a grave one, but not, as appeared,
+that she might measure this danger. "If I shouldn't
+do it, you know, it wouldn't be because I'm afraid
+of you."
+</p><p>
+"Oh, if you don't do it," he retorted, "you may
+be as bold as you like!"
+</p><p>
+"Then you can do nothing at all for me?"
+</p><p>
+He showed her, this time unmistakably&mdash;it was
+before her there on the landing, at the top of the
+tortuous stairs and in the midst of the strange smell
+that seemed to cling to them&mdash;how vain her appeal
+remained. "I've never pretended to do more
+than my duty; I've given you the best and the clearest
+advice." And then came up the spring that
+moved him. "If it only displeases you, you can go
+to Marian to be consoled." What he couldn't forgive
+was her dividing with Marian her scant share
+of the provision their mother had been able to leave
+them. She should have divided it with <i>him.</i>
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">II</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+She had gone to Mrs. Lowder on her mother's
+death&mdash;gone with an effort the strain and pain of
+which made her at present, as she recalled them,
+reflect on the long way she had travelled since then.
+There had been nothing else to do&mdash;not a penny
+in the other house, nothing but unpaid bills that had
+gathered thick while its mistress lay mortally ill,
+and the admonition that there was nothing she must
+attempt to raise money on, since everything belonged
+to the "estate." How the estate would turn
+out at best presented itself as a mystery altogether
+gruesome; it had proved, in fact, since then a residuum
+a trifle less scant than, with Marian, she had for
+some weeks feared; but the girl had had at the beginning
+rather a wounded sense of its being watched
+on behalf of Marian and her children. What on
+earth was it supposed that <i>she</i> wanted to do to it?
+She wanted in truth only to give up&mdash;to abandon her
+own interest, which she, no doubt, would already
+have done had not the point been subject to Aunt
+Maud's sharp intervention. Aunt Maud's intervention
+was all sharp now, and the other point, the
+great one, was that it was to be, in this light, either
+all put up with or all declined. Yet at the winter's
+end, nevertheless, she could scarce have said what
+stand she conceived she had taken. It wouldn't be
+the first time she had seen herself obliged to accept
+with smothered irony other people's interpretation
+of her conduct. She often ended by giving up to
+them&mdash;it seemed really the way to live&mdash;the version
+that met their convenience.
+</p><p>
+The tall, rich, heavy house at Lancaster Gate, on
+the other side of the Park and the long South Kensington
+stretches, had figured to her, through childhood,
+through girlhood, as the remotest limit of her
+vague young world. It was further off and more
+occasional than anything else in the comparatively
+compact circle in which she revolved, and seemed,
+by a rigour early marked, to be reached through
+long, straight, discouraging vistas, which kept
+lengthening and straightening, whereas almost
+everything else in life was either, at the worst, round
+about Cromwell Road, or, at the furthest, in the
+nearer parts of Kensington Gardens. Mrs. Lowder
+was her only "real" aunt, not the wife of an uncle,
+and had been thereby, both in ancient days and when
+the greater trouble came, the person, of all persons,
+properly to make some sign; in accord with which
+our young woman's feeling was founded on the impression,
+quite cherished for years, that the signs
+made across the interval just mentioned had never
+been really in the note of the situation. The main
+office of this relative, for the young Croys&mdash;apart
+from giving them their fixed measure of social greatness&mdash;had
+struck them as being to form them to a
+conception of what they were not to expect. When
+Kate came to think matters over with the aid of
+knowledge, she failed quite to see how Aunt Maud
+could have been different&mdash;she had rather perceived
+by this time how many other things might have
+been; yet she also made out that if they had all consciously
+lived under a liability to the chill breath of
+<i>ultima Thule</i> they couldn't, either, on the facts, very
+well have done less. What in the event appeared
+established was that if Mrs. Lowder had disliked
+them she had yet not disliked them so much as they
+supposed. It had at any rate been for the purpose
+of showing how she struggled with her aversion
+that she sometimes came to see them, that she at
+regular periods invited them to her house, and in
+short, as it now looked, kept them along on the
+terms that would best give her sister the perennial
+luxury of a grievance. This sister, poor Mrs. Croy,
+the girl knew, had always judged her resentfully,
+and had brought them up, Marian, the boys and
+herself, to the idea of a particular attitude, for signs
+of the practice of which they watched each other
+with awe. The attitude was to make plain to Aunt
+Maud, with the same regularity as her invitations,
+that they sufficed&mdash;thanks awfully&mdash;to themselves.
+But the ground of it, Kate lived to discern, was that
+this was only because <i>she</i> didn't suffice to them. The
+little she offered was to be accepted under protest,
+yet not, really, because it was excessive. It wounded
+them&mdash;there was the rub!&mdash;because it fell short.
+</p><p>
+The number of new things our young lady looked
+out on from the high south window that hung over
+the Park&mdash;this number was so great (though some
+of the things were only old ones altered and, as
+the phrase was of other matters, done up), that life
+at present turned to her view from week to week
+more and more the face of a striking and distinguished
+stranger. She had reached a great age&mdash;for
+it quite seemed to her that at twenty-five it was
+late to reconsider; and her most general sense was
+a shade of regret that she had not known earlier.
+The world was different&mdash;whether for worse or for
+better&mdash;from her rudimentary readings, and it gave
+her the feeling of a wasted past. If she had only
+known sooner she might have arranged herself more
+to meet it. She made, at all events, discoveries
+every day, some of which were about herself and
+others about other persons. Two of these&mdash;one
+under each head&mdash;more particularly engaged, in
+alternation, her anxiety. She saw as she had never
+seen before how material things spoke to her. She
+saw, and she blushed to see, that if, in contrast with
+some of its old aspects, life now affected her as a
+dress successfully "done up," this was exactly by
+reason of the trimmings and lace, was a matter of
+ribbons and silk and velvet. She had a dire accessibility
+to pleasure from such sources. She liked
+the charming quarters her aunt had assigned her&mdash;liked
+them literally more than she had in all her
+other days liked anything; and nothing could have
+been more uneasy than her suspicion of her relative's
+view of this truth. Her relative was prodigious&mdash;she
+had never done her relative justice. These
+larger conditions all tasted of her, from morning
+till night; but she was a person in respect to whom
+the growth of acquaintance could only&mdash;strange as
+it might seem&mdash;keep your heart in your mouth.
+</p><p>
+The girl's second great discovery was that, so
+far from having been for Mrs. Lowder a subject of
+superficial consideration, the blighted home in Lexham
+Gardens had haunted her nights and her days.
+Kate had spent, all winter, hours of observation that
+were not less pointed for being spent alone; recent
+events, which her mourning explained, assured her
+a measure of isolation, and it was in the isolation
+above all that her neighbour's influence worked.
+Sitting far downstairs Aunt Maud was yet a presence
+from which a sensitive niece could feel herself
+extremely under pressure. She knew herself now,
+the sensitive niece, as having been marked from far
+back. She knew more than she could have told you,
+by the upstairs fire, in a whole dark December afternoon.
+She knew so much that her knowledge was
+what fairly kept her there, making her at times
+more endlessly between the small silk-covered sofa
+that stood for her in the firelight and the great grey
+map of Middlesex spread beneath her lookout. To
+go down, to forsake her refuge, was to meet some
+of her discoveries half-way, to have to face them
+or fly before them; whereas they were at such a
+height only like the rumble of a far-off siege heard
+in the provisioned citadel. She had almost liked,
+in these weeks, what had created her suspense and
+her stress: the loss of her mother, the submersion
+of her father, the discomfort of her sister, the confirmation
+of their shrunken prospects, the certainty,
+in especial, of her having to recognise that, should
+she behave, as she called it, decently&mdash;that is still
+do something for others&mdash;she would be herself
+wholly without supplies. She held that she had a
+right to sadness and stillness; she nursed them for
+their postponing power. What they mainly postponed
+was the question of a surrender&mdash;though she
+could not yet have said exactly of what: a general
+surrender of everything&mdash;that was at moments the
+way it presented itself&mdash;to Aunt Maud's looming
+"personality." It was by her personality that Aunt
+Maud was prodigious, and the great mass of it
+loomed because, in the thick, the foglike air of her
+arranged existence, there were parts doubtless magnified
+and parts certainly vague. They represented
+at all events alike, the dim and the distinct, a strong
+will and a high hand. It was perfectly present to
+Kate that she might be devoured, and she likened
+herself to a trembling kid, kept apart a day or two
+till her turn should come, but sure sooner or later to
+be introduced into the cage of the lioness.
+</p><p>
+The cage was Aunt Maud's own room, her office,
+her counting-house, her battlefield, her especial
+scene, in fine, of action, situated on the ground-floor,
+opening from the main hall and figuring rather to
+our young woman on exit and entrance as a guard
+house or a toll-gate. The lioness waited&mdash;the kid
+had at least that consciousness; was aware of the
+neighbourhood of a morsel she had reason to suppose
+tender. She would have been meanwhile a
+wonderful lioness for a show, an extraordinary figure
+in a cage or anywhere; majestic, magnificent,
+high-coloured, all brilliant gloss, perpetual satin,
+twinkling bugles and flashing gems, with a lustre
+of agate eyes, a sheen of raven hair, a polish of
+complexion that was like that of well-kept china
+and that&mdash;as if the skin were too tight&mdash;told especially
+at curves and corners. Her niece had a quiet
+name for her&mdash;she kept it quiet; thinking of her,
+with a free fancy, as somehow typically insular, she
+talked to herself of Britannia of the Market Place&mdash;Britannia
+unmistakable, but with a pen in her
+ear, and felt she should not be happy till she might
+on some occasion add to the rest of the panoply
+a helmet, a shield, a trident and a ledger. It was
+not in truth, however, that the forces with which,
+as Kate felt, she would have to deal were those
+most suggested by an image simple and broad; she
+was learning, after all, each day, to know her companion,
+and what she had already most perceived
+was the mistake of trusting to easy analogies.
+There was a whole side of Britannia, the side of
+her florid philistinism, her plumes and her train,
+her fantastic furniture and heaving bosom, the false
+gods of her taste and false notes of her talk, the
+sole contemplation of which would be dangerously
+misleading. She was a complex and subtle Britannia,
+as passionate as she was practical, with a reticule
+for her prejudices as deep as that other pocket,
+the pocket full of coins stamped in her image, that
+the world best knew her by. She carried on, in
+short, behind her aggressive and defensive front,
+operations determined by her wisdom. It was in
+fact, we have hinted, as a besieger that our young
+lady, in the provisioned citadel, had for the present
+most to think of her, and what made her formidable
+in this character was that she was unscrupulous and
+immoral. So, at all events, in silent sessions and
+a youthful off-hand way, Kate conveniently pictured
+her: what this sufficiently represented being that
+her weight was in the scale of certain dangers&mdash;those
+dangers that, by our showing, made the
+younger woman linger and lurk above, while the
+elder, below, both militant and diplomatic, covered
+as much of the ground as possible. Yet what were
+the dangers, after all, but just the dangers of life
+and of London? Mrs. Lowder <i>was</i> London, <i>was</i>
+life&mdash;the roar of the siege and the thick of the fray.
+There were some things, after all, of which Britannia
+was afraid; but Aunt Maud was afraid of nothing&mdash;not
+even, it would appear, of arduous thought.
+These impressions, none the less, Kate kept so
+much to herself that she scarce shared them with
+poor Marian, the ostensible purpose of her frequent
+visits to whom yet continued to be to talk
+over everything. One of her reasons for holding
+off from the last concession to Aunt Maud was that
+she might be the more free to commit herself to
+this so much nearer and so much less fortunate
+relative, with whom Aunt Maud would have, directly,
+almost nothing to do. The sharpest pinch
+of her state, meanwhile, was exactly that all intercourse
+with her sister had the effect of casting
+down her courage and tying her hands, adding daily
+to her sense of the part, not always either uplifting
+or sweetening, that the bond of blood might play
+in one's life. She was face to face with it now, with
+the bond of blood; the consciousness of it was
+what she seemed most clearly to have "come into"
+by the death of her mother, much of that consciousness
+as her mother had absorbed and carried away.
+Her haunting, harrassing father, her menacing, uncompromising
+aunt, her portionless little nephews
+and nieces, were figures that caused the chord of
+natural piety superabundantly to vibrate. Her manner
+of putting it to herself&mdash;but more especially
+in respect to Marian&mdash;was that she saw what you
+might be brought to by the cultivation of consanguinity.
+She had taken, in the old days, as she
+supposed, the measure of this liability; those being
+the days when, as the second-born, she had thought
+no one in the world so pretty as Marian, no one
+so charming, so clever, so assured, in advance, of
+happiness and success. The view was different
+now, but her attitude had been obliged, for many
+reasons, to show as the same. The subject of this
+estimate was no longer pretty, as the reason for
+thinking her clever was no longer plain; yet, bereaved,
+disappointed, demoralised, querulous, she
+was all the more sharply and insistently Kate's elder
+and Kate's own. Kate's most constant feeling
+about her was that she would make her, Kate,
+do things; and always, in comfortless Chelsea,
+at the door of the small house the small rent of
+which she couldn't help having on her mind, she
+fatalistically asked herself, before going in, which
+thing it would probably be this time. She noticed
+with profundity that disappointment made people
+selfish; she marvelled at the serenity&mdash;it was the
+poor woman's only one&mdash;of what Marian took for
+granted: her own state of abasement as the second-born,
+her life reduced to mere inexhaustible
+sisterhood. She existed, in that view, wholly for
+the small house in Chelsea; 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 <i>them</i> that they were eating one up. They did
+that without tasting.
+</p><p>
+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. However, as she
+never really let Marian see what she was, Marian
+might well not have been aware that she herself
+saw. Kate was accordingly, to her own vision,
+not a hypocrite of virtue, for she gave herself up;
+but she was a hypocrite of stupidity, for she kept
+to herself everything that was not herself. What
+she most kept was the particular sentiment with
+which she watched her sister instinctively neglect
+nothing that would make for her submission to
+their aunt; a state of the spirit that perhaps marked
+most sharply how poor you might become when
+you minded so much the absence of wealth. It was
+through Kate that Aunt Maud should be worked,
+and nothing mattered less than what might become
+of Kate in the process. Kate was to burn her
+ships, in short, so that Marian should profit; and
+Marian's desire to profit was quite oblivious of a
+dignity that had, after all, its reasons&mdash;if it had
+only cared for them&mdash;for keeping itself a little stiff.
+Kate, to be properly stiff for both of them, would
+therefore have had to be selfish, have had to prefer
+an ideal of behaviour&mdash;than which nothing, ever,
+was more selfish&mdash;to the possibility of stray crumbs
+for the four small creatures. The tale of Mrs.
+Lowder's disgust at her elder niece's marriage to
+Mr. Condrip had lost little of its point; the incredibly
+fatuous behaviour of Mr. Condrip, the parson
+of a dull suburban parish, with a saintly profile
+which was always in evidence, being so distinctly on
+record to keep criticism consistent. He had presented
+his profile on system, having, goodness
+knew, nothing else to present&mdash;nothing at all to
+full-face the world with, no imagination of the propriety
+of living and minding his business. Criticism
+had remained on Aunt Maud's part consistent
+enough; she was not a person to regard such proceedings
+as less of a mistake for having acquired
+more of the privilege of pathos. She had not been
+forgiving, and the only approach she made to overlooking
+them was by overlooking&mdash;with the surviving
+delinquent&mdash;the solid little phalanx that now
+represented them. Of the two sinister ceremonies
+that she lumped together, the marriage and the interment,
+she had been present at the former, just
+as she had sent Marian, before it, a liberal cheque;
+but this had not been for her more than the shadow
+of an admitted link with Mrs. Condrip's course.
+She disapproved of clamorous children for whom
+there was no prospect; she disapproved of weeping
+widows who couldn't make their errors good;
+and she had thus put within Marian's reach one of
+the few luxuries left when so much else had gone,
+an easy pretext for a constant grievance. Kate
+Croy remembered well what their mother, in a different
+quarter, had made of it; and it was Marian's
+marked failure to pluck the fruit of resentment that
+committed them, as sisters, to an almost equal fellowship
+in abjection. If the theory was that, yes,
+alas, one of the pair had ceased to be noticed, but
+that the other was noticed enough to make up for
+it, who would fail to see that Kate couldn't separate
+herself without a cruel pride? That lesson became
+sharp for our young lady the day after her interview
+with her father.
+</p><p>
+"I can't imagine," Marian on this occasion said
+to her, "how you can think of anything else in
+the world but the horrid way we're situated."
+</p><p>
+"And, pray, how do you know," Kate inquired
+in reply, "anything about my thoughts? It seems
+to me I give you sufficient proof of how much I
+think of <i>you.</i> I don't, really, my dear, know what
+else you've to do with!"
+</p><p>
+Marian's retort, on this, was a stroke as to which
+she had supplied herself with several kinds of preparation,
+but there was, none the less, something of
+an unexpected note in its promptitude. She had
+foreseen her sister's general fear; but here, ominously,
+was the special one. "Well, your own business
+is of course your own business, and you may
+say there's no one less in a position than I to preach
+to you. But, all the same, if you wash your hands
+of me for ever for it, I won't, for this once, keep
+back that I don't consider you've a right, as we all
+stand, to throw yourself away."
+</p><p>
+It was after the children's dinner, which was also
+their mother's, but which their aunt mostly contrived
+to keep from ever becoming her own
+luncheon; and the two young women were still in
+the presence of the crumpled table-cloth, the dispersed
+pinafores, the scraped dishes, the lingering
+odour of boiled food. Kate had asked, with ceremony,
+if she might put up a window a little, and
+Mrs. Condrip had replied without it that she might
+do as she liked. She often received such inquiries
+as if they reflected in a manner on the pure essence
+of her little ones. The four had retired, with much
+movement and noise, under imperfect control of
+the small Irish governess whom their aunt had
+hunted out for them and whose brooding resolve
+not to prolong so uncrowned a martyrdom she
+already more than suspected. Their mother had
+become for Kate&mdash;who took it just for the effect
+of being their mother&mdash;quite a different thing from
+the mild Marian of the past: Mr. Condrip's widow
+expansively obscured that image. She was little
+more than a ragged relic, a plain, prosaic result of
+him, as if she had somehow been pulled through
+him as through an obstinate funnel, only to be left
+crumpled and useless and with nothing in her but
+what he accounted for. She had grown red and
+almost fat, which were not happy signs of mourning;
+less and less like any Croy, particularly a Croy
+in trouble, and sensibly like her husband's two unmarried
+sisters, who came to see her, in Kate's
+view, much too often and stayed too long, with the
+consequence of inroads upon the tea and bread-and-butter&mdash;matters
+as to which Kate, not unconcerned
+with the tradesmen's books, had feelings.
+About them, moreover, Marian <i>was</i> touchy, and
+her nearer relative, who observed and weighed
+things, noted as an oddity that she would have
+taken any reflection on them as a reflection on herself.
+If that was what marriage necessarily did to
+you, Kate Croy would have questioned marriage.
+It was a grave example, at any rate, of what a man&mdash;and
+such a man!&mdash;might make of a woman. She
+could see how the Condrip pair pressed their
+brother's widow on the subject of Aunt Maud&mdash;who
+wasn't, after all, <i>their</i> aunt; made her, over
+their interminable cups, chatter and even swagger
+about Lancaster Gate, made her more vulgar than
+it had seemed written that any Croy could possibly
+become on such a subject. They laid it down, they
+rubbed it in, that Lancaster Gate was to be kept
+in sight, and that she, Kate, was to keep it; so
+that, curiously, or at all events sadly, our young
+woman was sure of being, in her own person, more
+permitted to them as an object of comment than
+they would in turn ever be permitted to herself.
+The beauty of which, too, was that Marian didn't
+love them. But they were Condrips&mdash;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&mdash;&mdash;! It may easily
+be guessed, therefore, that the ironic light of such
+reserves fell straight across the field of Marian's
+warning. "I don't quite see," she answered,
+"where, in particular, it strikes you that my danger
+lies. I'm not conscious, I assure you, of the least
+'disposition' to throw myself anywhere. I feel
+as if, for the present, I have been quite sufficiently
+thrown."
+</p><p>
+"You don't feel"&mdash;Marian brought it all out&mdash;"as
+if you would like to marry Merton Densher?"
+</p><p>
+Kate took a moment to meet this inquiry. "Is
+it your idea that if I should feel so I would be
+bound to give you notice, so that you might step
+in and head me off? Is that your idea?" the girl
+asked. Then, as her sister also had a pause, "I
+don't know what makes you talk of Mr. Densher,"
+she observed.
+</p><p>
+"I talk of him just because you don't. That
+you never do, in spite of what I know&mdash;that's what
+makes me think of him. Or rather perhaps it's
+what makes me think of <i>you.</i> If you don't know by
+this time what I hope for you, what I dream of&mdash;my
+attachment being what it is&mdash;it's no use my
+attempting to tell you." But Marian had in fact
+warmed to her work, and Kate was sure she had
+discussed Mr. Densher with the Miss Condrips.
+"If I name that person I suppose it's because I'm
+so afraid of him. If you want really to know, he
+fills me with terror. If you want really to know,
+in fact, I dislike him as much as I dread him."
+</p><p>
+"And yet don't think it dangerous to abuse him
+to me?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes," Mrs. Condrip confessed, "I do think it
+dangerous; but how can I speak of him otherwise?
+I dare say, I admit, that I shouldn't speak of him
+at all. Only I do want you for once, as I said just
+now, to know."
+</p><p>
+"To know what, my dear?"
+</p><p>
+"That I should regard it," Marian promptly returned,
+"as far and away the worst thing that has
+happened to us yet."
+</p><p>
+"Do you mean because he hasn't money?"
+</p><p>
+"Yes, for one thing. And because I don't believe
+in him."
+</p><p>
+Kate was civil, but perfunctory. "What do you
+mean by not believing in him?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, being sure he'll never get it. And you
+<i>must</i> have it. You <i>shall</i> have it."
+</p><p>
+"To give it to you?"
+</p><p>
+Marian met her with a readiness that was practically
+pert. "To <i>have</i> it, first. Not, at any
+rate, to go on not having it. Then we should
+see."
+</p><p>
+"We should indeed!" said Kate Croy. It was
+talk of a kind she loathed, but if Marian chose to
+be vulgar what was one to do? It made her think
+of the Miss Condrips with renewed aversion. "I
+like the way you arrange things&mdash;I like what you
+take for granted. If it's so easy for us to marry
+men who want us to scatter gold, I wonder we any
+of us do anything else. I don't see so many of
+them about, nor what interest I might ever have
+for them. You live, my dear," she presently added,
+"in a world of vain thoughts."
+</p><p>
+"Not so much as you, Kate; for I see what I
+see, and you can't turn it off that way." The elder
+sister paused long enough for the younger's face
+to show, in spite of superiority, an apprehension.
+"I'm not talking of any man but Aunt Maud's man,
+nor of any money, even, if you like, but Aunt
+Maud's money. I'm not talking of anything but
+your doing what <i>she</i> wants. You're wrong if you
+speak of anything that I want of you; I want nothing
+but what she does. That's good enough for
+me!"&mdash;and Marian's tone struck her companion as
+dreadful. "If I don't believe in Merton Densher,
+I do at least in Mrs. Lowder."
+</p><p>
+"Your ideas are the more striking," Kate returned,
+"that they're the same as papa's. I had
+them from him, you may be interested to know&mdash;and
+with all the brilliancy you may imagine&mdash;yesterday."
+</p><p>
+Marian clearly was interested to know. "He has
+been to see you?"
+</p><p>
+"No, I went to him."
+</p><p>
+"Really?" Marian wondered. "For what purpose?"
+</p><p>
+"To tell him I'm ready to go to him."
+</p><p>
+Marian stared. "To leave Aunt Maud&mdash;&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"For my father, yes."
+</p><p>
+She had fairly flushed, poor Mrs. Condrip, with
+horror. "You're ready&mdash;&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"So I told him. I couldn't tell him less."
+</p><p>
+"And, pray, could you tell him more?" Marian
+gasped in her distress. "What in the world is he
+<i>to</i> us? You bring out such a thing as that this
+way?"
+</p><p>
+They faced each other&mdash;the tears were in Marian's
+eyes. Kate watched them there a moment and
+then said: "I had thought it well over&mdash;over and
+over. But you needn't feel injured. I'm not going.
+He won't have me."
+</p><p>
+Her companion still panted&mdash;it took time to subside.
+"Well, <i>I</i> wouldn't have you&mdash;wouldn't receive
+you at all, I can assure you&mdash;if he had made
+you any other answer. I do feel injured&mdash;at your
+having been willing. If you were to go to papa,
+my dear, you would have to stop coming to me."
+Marian put it thus, indefinably, as a picture of privation
+from which her companion might shrink. Such
+were the threats she could complacently make, could
+think herself masterful for making. "But if he
+won't take you," she continued, "he shows at least
+his sharpness."
+</p><p>
+Marian had always her views of sharpness; she
+was, as her sister privately commented, great on
+it. But Kate had her refuge from irritation. "He
+won't take me," she simply repeated. "But he
+believes, like you, in Aunt Maud. He threatens
+me with his curse if I leave her."
+</p><p>
+"So you <i>won't?"</i> As the girl at first said nothing
+her companion caught at it. "You won't, of
+course? I see you won't. But I don't see why,
+nevertheless, I shouldn't insist to you once for all
+on the plain truth of the whole matter. The truth,
+my dear, of your duty. Do you ever think about
+<i>that?</i> It's the greatest duty of all."
+</p><p>
+"There you are again," Kate laughed. "Papa's
+also immense on my duty."
+</p><p>
+"Oh, I don't pretend to be immense, but I pretend
+to know more than you do of life; more even
+perhaps than papa." Marian seemed to see that
+personage at this moment, nevertheless, in the light
+of a kinder irony. "Poor old papa!"
+</p><p>
+She sighed it with as many condonations as her
+sister's ear had more than once caught in her "Dear
+old Aunt Maud!" These were things that made
+Kate, for the time, turn sharply away, and she gathered
+herself now to go. They were the note again
+of the abject; it was hard to say which of the persons
+in question had most shown how little they
+liked her. The younger woman proposed, at any
+rate, to let discussion rest, and she believed that,
+for herself, she had done so during the ten minutes
+that, thanks to her wish not to break off short,
+elapsed before she could gracefully withdraw. It
+then appeared, however, that Marian had been discussing
+still, and there was something that, at the
+last, Kate had to take up. "Whom do you mean
+by Aunt Maud's young man?"
+</p><p>
+"Whom should I mean but Lord Mark?"
+</p><p>
+"And where do you pick up such vulgar twaddle?"
+Kate demanded with her clear face. "How
+does such stuff, in this hole, get to you?"
+</p><p>
+She had no sooner spoken than she asked herself
+what had become of the grace to which she
+had sacrificed. Marian certainly did little to save
+it, and nothing indeed was so inconsequent as her
+ground of complaint. She desired her to "work"
+Lancaster Gate as she believed that scene of abundance
+could be worked; but she now didn't see
+why advantage should be taken of the bloated connection
+to put an affront on her own poor home.
+She appeared in fact for the moment to take the
+position that Kate kept her in her "hole" and
+then heartlessly reflected on her being in it. Yet
+she didn't explain how she had picked up the report
+on which her sister had challenged her&mdash;so
+that it was thus left to her sister to see in it, once
+more, a sign of the creeping curiosity of the Miss
+Condrips. They lived in a deeper hole than Marian,
+but they kept their ear to the ground, they
+spent their days in prowling, whereas Marian, in
+garments and shoes that seemed steadily to grow
+looser and larger, never prowled. There were times
+when Kate wondered if the Miss Condrips were
+offered her by fate as a warning for her own future&mdash;to
+be taken as showing her what she herself
+might become at forty if she let things too recklessly
+go. What was expected of her by others&mdash;and
+by so many of them&mdash;could, all the same, on
+occasion, present itself as beyond a joke; and this
+was just now the aspect it particularly wore. She
+was not only to quarrel with Merton Densher to
+oblige her five spectators&mdash;with the Miss Condrips
+there were five; she was to set forth in pursuit of
+Lord Mark on some preposterous theory of the
+premium attached to success. Mrs. Lowder's hand
+had attached it, and it figured at the end of the
+course as a bell that would ring, break out into
+public clamour, as soon as touched. Kate reflected
+sharply enough on the weak points of this fond
+fiction, with the result at last of a certain chill for
+her sister's confidence; though Mrs. Condrip still
+took refuge in the plea&mdash;which was after all the
+great point&mdash;that their aunt would be munificent
+when their aunt should be pleased. The exact identity
+of her candidate was a detail; what was of the
+essence was her conception of the kind of match it
+was open to her niece to make with her aid. Marian
+always spoke of marriages as "matches," but
+that was again a detail. Mrs. Lowder's "aid"
+meanwhile awaited them&mdash;if not to light the way
+to Lord Mark, then to somebody better. Marian
+would put up, in fine, with somebody better; she
+only wouldn't put up with somebody so much
+worse. Kate had, once more, to go through all
+this before a graceful issue was reached. It was
+reached by her paying with the sacrifice of Mr.
+Densher for her reduction of Lord Mark to the
+absurd. So they separated softly enough. She was
+to be let off hearing about Lord Mark so long as
+she made it good that she wasn't underhand about
+anybody else. She had denied everything and
+every one, she reflected as she went away&mdash;and that
+was a relief; but it also made rather a clean sweep
+of the future. The prospect put on a bareness that
+already gave her something in common with the
+Miss Condrips.
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">BOOK SECOND</h2>
+<br>
+<h2 align="center">III</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+Merton Densher, who passed the best
+hours of each night at the office of his newspaper,
+had at times, during the day, to make up for
+it, a sense, or at least an appearance, of leisure, in
+accordance with which he was not infrequently to
+be met, in different parts of the town, at moments
+when men of business are hidden from the public
+eye. More than once, during the present winter's
+end, he had deviated, toward three o'clock, or toward
+four, into Kensington Gardens, where he might
+for a while, on each occasion, have been observed
+to demean himself as a person with nothing to do.
+He made his way indeed, for the most part, with
+a certain directness, over to the north side; but
+once that ground was reached his behaviour was
+noticeably wanting in point. He moved seemingly
+at random from alley to alley; he stopped for no
+reason and remained idly agaze; he sat down in
+a chair and then changed to a bench; after which
+he walked about again, only again to repeat both
+the vagueness and the vivacity. Distinctly, he was
+a man either with nothing at all to do or with ever
+so much to think about; and it was not to be denied
+that the impression he might often thus easily
+make had the effect of causing the burden of proof,
+in certain directions, to rest on him. It was a little
+the fault of his aspect, his personal marks, which
+made it almost impossible to name his profession.
+</p><p>
+He was a longish, leanish, fairish young Englishman,
+not unamenable, on certain sides, to classification&mdash;as
+for instance by being a gentleman, by
+being rather specifically one of the educated, one
+of the generally sound and generally pleasant; 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. On
+the other hand he was credulous for diplomacy, or
+perhaps even for science, while he was perhaps at
+the same time too much in his mere senses for
+poetry, and yet too little in them for art. 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&mdash;idle without looking empty. It was the accident,
+possibly, of his long legs, which were apt to
+stretch themselves; of his straight hair and his well-shaped
+head, never, the latter, neatly smooth, and
+apt, into the bargain, at the time of quite other
+calls upon it, to throw itself suddenly back and,
+supported behind by his uplifted arms and interlocked
+hands, place him for unconscionable periods
+in communion with the ceiling, the tree-tops, the
+sky. He was in short visibly absent-minded, irregularly
+clever, liable to drop what was near and to
+take up what was far; he was more a respecter, in
+general, than a follower of custom. He suggested
+above all, however, that wondrous state of youth
+in which the elements, the metals more or less
+precious, are so in fusion and fermentation that
+the question of the final stamp, the pressure that
+fixes the value, must wait for comparative coolness.
+And it was a mark of his interesting mixture that
+if he was irritable it was by a law of considerable
+subtlety&mdash;a law that, in intercourse with him, it
+might be of profit, though not easy, to master.
+One of the effects of it was that he had for you
+surprises of tolerance as well as of temper.
+</p><p>
+He loitered, on the best of the relenting days,
+the several occasions we speak of, along the part
+of the Gardens nearest to Lancaster Gate, and
+when, always, in due time, Kate Croy came out of
+her aunt's house, crossed the road and arrived by
+the nearest entrance, there was a general publicity
+in the proceeding which made it slightly anomalous.
+If their meeting was to be bold and free it might
+have taken place within doors; if it was to be shy
+or secret it might have taken place almost anywhere
+better than under Mrs. Lowder's windows.
+They failed indeed to remain attached to that spot;
+they wandered and strolled, taking in the course
+of more than one of these interviews a considerable
+walk, or else picked out a couple of chairs under
+one of the great trees and sat as much apart&mdash;apart
+from every one else&mdash;as possible. But Kate
+had, each time, at first, the air of wishing to expose
+herself to pursuit and capture if those things were
+in question. She made the point that she was not
+underhand, any more than she was vulgar; that the
+Gardens were charming in themselves and this use
+of them a matter of taste; and that, if her aunt
+chose to glare at her from the drawing-room or to
+cause her to be tracked and overtaken, she could at
+least make it convenient that this should be easily
+done. The fact was that the relation between these
+young persons abounded in such oddities as were
+not inaptly symbolised by assignations that had a
+good deal more appearance than motive. Of the
+strength of the tie that held them we shall sufficiently
+take the measure; but it was meanwhile almost
+obvious that if the great possibility had come
+up for them it had done so, to an exceptional degree,
+under the protection of the famous law of
+contraries. Any deep harmony that might eventually
+govern them would not be the result of their
+having much in common&mdash;having anything, in fact,
+but their affection; and would really find its explanation
+in some sense, on the part of each, of
+being poor where the other was rich. It is nothing
+new indeed that generous young persons often admire
+most what nature hasn't given them&mdash;from
+which it would appear, after all, that our friends
+were both generous.
+</p><p>
+Merton Densher had repeatedly said to himself&mdash;and
+from far back&mdash;that he should be a fool not
+to marry a woman whose value would be in her
+differences; and Kate Croy, though without having
+quite so philosophised, had quickly recognised
+in the young man a precious unlikeness. He represented
+what her life had never given her and certainly,
+without some such aid as his, never would
+give her; all the high, dim things she lumped together
+as of the mind. It was on the side of the
+mind that Densher was rich for her, and mysterious
+and strong; and he had rendered her in especial
+the sovereign service of making that element real.
+She had had, all her days, to take it terribly on
+trust; no creature she had ever encountered having
+been able in any degree to testify for it directly.
+Vague rumours of its existence had made their
+precarious way to her; but nothing had, on the
+whole, struck her as more likely than that she should
+live and die without the chance to verify them.
+The chance had come&mdash;it was an extraordinary one&mdash;on
+the day she first met Densher; and it was to
+the girl's lasting honour that she knew on the spot
+what she was in the presence of. That occasion
+indeed, for everything that straightway flowered in
+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 recognition.
+Having so often concluded on the fact of
+his weakness, as he called it, for life&mdash;his strength
+merely for thought&mdash;life, he logically opined, was
+what he must somehow arrange to annex and possess.
+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, ingenious but large, critical but
+ardent too, made out both his case and Kate Croy's.
+They had originally met before her mother's death&mdash;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 beginning.
+</p><p>
+The beginning&mdash;to which she often went back&mdash;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 delight
+of the town, an American reciter, the joy of
+a kindred people, an Hungarian fiddler, the wonder
+of the world at large&mdash;in the name of these and
+other attractions the company in which, by a rare
+privilege, Kate found herself had been freely convoked.
+She lived under her mother's roof, as she
+considered, obscurely, and was acquainted with few
+persons who entertained on that scale; but she had
+had dealings with two or three connected, as appeared,
+with such&mdash;two or three through whom
+the stream of hospitality, filtered or diffused, could
+thus now and then spread to outlying receptacles.
+A good-natured lady in fine, a friend of her mother
+and a relative of the lady of the gallery, had offered
+to take her to the party in question and had there
+fortified her, further, with two or three of those
+introductions that, at large parties, lead to other
+things&mdash;that had at any rate, on this occasion, culminated
+for her in conversation with a tall, fair,
+slightly unbrushed and rather awkward, but on the
+whole not dreary, young man. The young man had
+affected her as detached, as&mdash;it was indeed what
+he called himself&mdash;awfully at sea, as much more distinct
+from what surrounded them than any one
+else appeared to be, and even as probably quite disposed
+to be making his escape when pulled up to
+be placed in relation with her. He gave her his
+word for it indeed, that same evening, that only
+their meeting had prevented his flight, but that now
+he saw how sorry he should have been to miss it.
+This point they had reached by midnight, and
+though in respect to such remarks everything was
+in the tone, the tone was by midnight there too.
+She had had originally her full apprehension of his
+coerced, certainly of his vague, condition&mdash;full apprehensions
+often being with her immediate; then
+she had had her equal consciousness that, within
+five minutes, something between them had&mdash;well,
+she couldn't call it anything but <i>come.</i> It was nothing,
+but it was somehow everything&mdash;it was that
+something for each of them had happened.
+</p><p>
+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. It wasn't, in a word, simply
+that their eyes had met; other conscious organs,
+faculties, feelers had met as well, and when Kate
+afterwards imaged to herself the sharp, deep fact
+she saw it, in the oddest way, as a particular performance.
+She had observed a ladder against a
+garden wall, and had trusted herself so to climb
+it as to be able to see over into the probable garden
+on the other side. On reaching the top she had
+found herself face to face with a gentleman engaged
+in a like calculation at the same moment, and the
+two inquirers had remained confronted on their
+ladders. The great point was that for the rest of
+that evening they had been perched&mdash;they had not
+climbed down; and indeed, during the time that
+followed, Kate at least had had the perched feeling&mdash;it
+was as if she were there aloft without a retreat.
+A simpler expression of all this is doubtless but
+that they had taken each other in with interest; and
+without a happy hazard six months later the incident
+would have closed in that account of it. The
+accident, meanwhile, had been as natural as anything
+in London ever is: Kate had one afternoon
+found herself opposite Mr. Densher on the Underground
+Railway. She had entered the train at
+Sloane Square to go to Queen's Road, and the carriage
+in which she had found a place was all but
+full. Densher was already in it&mdash;on the other
+bench and at the furthest angle; she was sure of
+him before they had again started. The day and
+the hour were darkness, there were six other persons,
+and she had been busy placing herself; but
+her consciousness had gone to him as straight as
+if they had come together in some bright level of
+the desert. They had on neither part a second's
+hesitation; they looked across the choked compartment
+exactly as if she had known he would
+be there and he had expected her to come in; so
+that, though in the conditions they could only exchange
+the greeting of movements, smiles, silence,
+it would have been quite in the key of these passages
+that they should have alighted for ease at the
+very next station. Kate was in fact sure that the
+very next station was the young man's true goal&mdash;which
+made it clear that he was going on only
+from the wish to speak to her. He had to go on,
+for this purpose, to High Street, Kensington, as
+it was not till then that the exit of a passenger gave
+him his chance.
+</p><p>
+His chance put him, however, in quick possession
+of the seat facing her, the alertness of his capture
+of which seemed to show her his impatience.
+It helped them, moreover, with strangers on either
+side, little to talk; though this very restriction perhaps
+made such a mark for them as nothing else
+could have done. If the fact that their opportunity
+had again come round for them could be so intensely
+expressed between them without a word,
+they might very well feel on the spot that it had
+not come round for nothing. The extraordinary
+part of the matter was that they were not in the
+least meeting where they had left off, but ever so
+much further on, and that these added links added
+still another between High Street and Notting Hill
+Gate, and then between the latter station and
+Queen's Road an extension really inordinate. At
+Notting Hill Gate, Kate's right-hand neighbour
+descended, whereupon Densher popped straight
+into that seat; only there was not much gained
+when a lady, the next instant, popped into Densher's.
+He could say almost nothing to her&mdash;she
+scarce knew, at least, what he said; she was so occupied
+with a certainty that one of the persons
+opposite, a youngish man with a single eyeglass,
+which he kept constantly in position, had made her
+out from the first as visibly, as strangely affected.
+If such a person made her out, what then did
+Densher do?&mdash;a question in truth sufficiently answered
+when, on their reaching her station, he instantly
+followed her out of the train. That had
+been the real beginning&mdash;the beginning of everything
+else; the other time, the time at the party,
+had been but the beginning of <i>that.</i> Never in life
+before had she so let herself go; for always before&mdash;so
+far as small adventures could have been in
+question for her&mdash;there had been, by the vulgar
+measure, more to go upon. He had walked
+with her to Lancaster Gate, and then she had
+walked with him away from it&mdash;for all the world,
+she said to herself, like the housemaid giggling to
+the baker.
+</p><p>
+This appearance, she was afterwards to feel, had
+been all in order for a relation that might precisely
+best be described in the terms of the baker and the
+housemaid. She could say to herself that from that
+hour they had kept company; that had come to
+represent, technically speaking, alike the range and
+the limit of their tie. He had on the spot, naturally,
+asked leave to call upon her&mdash;which, as a young
+person who wasn't really young, who didn't pretend
+to be a sheltered flower, she as rationally gave.
+That&mdash;she was promptly clear about it&mdash;was now
+her only possible basis; she was just the contemporary
+London female, highly modern, inevitably
+battered, honourably free. She had of course taken
+her aunt straight into her confidence&mdash;had gone
+through the form of asking her leave; and she subsequently
+remembered that though, on this occasion,
+she had left the history of her new alliance as
+scant as the facts themselves, Mrs. Lowder had
+struck her at the time surprisingly mild. It had
+been, in every way, the occasion, full of the reminder
+that her hostess was deep: it was definitely
+then that she had begun to ask herself what Aunt
+Maud was, in vulgar parlance, "up to." "You
+may receive, my dear, whom you like"&mdash;that was
+what Aunt Maud, who in general objected to people's
+doing as they liked, had replied; and it bore,
+this unexpectedness, a good deal of looking into.
+There were many explanations, and they were all
+amusing&mdash;amusing, that is, in the line of the sombre
+and brooding amusement, cultivated by Kate in
+her actual high retreat. Merton Densher came the
+very next Sunday; but Mrs. Lowder was so consistently
+magnanimous as to make it possible to
+her niece to see him alone. She saw him, however,
+on the Sunday following, in order to invite him to
+dinner; and when, after dining, he came again&mdash;which
+he did three times, she found means to treat
+his visit as preponderantly to herself. Kate's conviction
+that she didn't like him made that remarkable;
+it added to the evidence, by this time voluminous,
+that she was remarkable all round. If she
+had been, in the way of energy, merely usual, she
+would have kept her dislike direct; whereas it was
+now as if she were seeking to know him in order to
+see best where to "have" him. That was one of
+the reflections made in our young woman's high
+retreat; she smiled from her lookout, in the silence
+that was only the fact of hearing irrelevant sounds,
+as she caught the truth that you could easily accept
+people when you wanted them so to be delivered
+to you. When Aunt Maud wished them despatched,
+it was not to be done by deputy; it was
+clearly always a matter reserved for her own hand.
+But what made the girl wonder most was the
+implications of so much diplomacy in respect to her
+own value. What view might she take of her position
+in the light of this appearance that her companion
+feared so, as yet, to upset her? It was as
+if Densher were accepted partly under the dread
+that if he hadn't been she would act in resentment.
+Hadn't her aunt considered the danger that she
+would in that case have broken off, have seceded?
+The danger was exaggerated&mdash;she would have done
+nothing so gross; but that, it seemed, was the way
+Mrs. Lowder saw her and believed her to be reckoned
+with. What importance therefore did she
+really attach to her, what strange interest could
+she take on their keeping on terms? Her father and
+her sister had their answer to this&mdash;even without
+knowing how the question struck her; they saw
+the lady of Lancaster Gate as panting to make her
+fortune, and the explanation of that appetite was
+that, on the accident of a nearer view than she had
+before enjoyed, she had been charmed, been dazzled.
+They approved, they admired in her one of the
+belated fancies of rich, capricious, violent old women&mdash;the
+more marked, moreover, because the result
+of no plot; and they piled up the possible results
+for the person concerned. Kate knew what to think
+of her own power thus to carry by storm; she saw
+herself as handsome, no doubt, but as hard, and
+felt herself as clever but as cold; and as so much
+too imperfectly ambitious, furthermore, that it was
+a pity, for a quiet life, she couldn't settle to be
+either finely or stupidly indifferent. Her intelligence
+sometimes kept her still&mdash;too still&mdash;but her
+want of it was restless; so that she got the good,
+it seemed to her, of neither extreme. She saw herself
+at present, none the less, in a situation, and
+even her sad, disillusioned mother, dying, but with
+Aunt Maud interviewing the nurse on the stairs,
+had not failed to remind her that it was of the
+essence of situations to be, under Providence,
+worked. The dear woman had died in the belief
+that she was actually working the one then produced.
+</p><p>
+Kate took one of her walks with Densher just
+after her visit to Mr. Croy; but most of it went, as
+usual, to their sitting in talk. They had, under the
+trees, by the lake, the air of old friends&mdash;phases of
+apparent earnestness, in particular, in which they
+might have been settling every question in their vast
+young world; and periods of silence, side by side,
+perhaps even more, when "a long engagement!"
+would have been the final reading of the signs on
+the part of a passer struck with them, as it was so
+easy to be. They would have presented themselves
+thus as very old friends rather than as young persons
+who had met for the first time but a year before
+and had spent most of the interval without
+contact. It was indeed for each, already, as if they
+were older friends; and though the succession of
+their meetings might, between them, have been
+straightened out, they only had a confused sense
+of a good many, very much alike, and a confused
+intention of a good many more, as little different
+as possible. The desire to keep them just as they
+were had perhaps to do with the fact that in spite
+of the presumed diagnosis of the stranger there had
+been for them as yet no formal, no final understanding.
+Densher had at the very first pressed the question,
+but that, it had been easy to reply, was too
+soon; 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, in London, remarkable, and
+for Marian not less&mdash;as Aunt Maud touched neither
+directly&mdash;the mystery had worked. No doubt she
+had been seen. Of course she had been seen. She
+had taken no trouble not to be seen, and it was
+a thing, clearly, she was incapable of taking. But
+she had been seen how?&mdash;and <i>what</i> was there to see?
+She was in love&mdash;she knew that: but it was wholly
+her own business, and she had the sense of having
+conducted herself, of still so doing, with almost
+violent conformity.
+</p><p>
+"I've an idea&mdash;in fact I feel sure&mdash;that Aunt
+Maud means to write to you; and I think you had
+better know it." So much as this she said to him
+as soon as they met, but immediately adding to it:
+"So as to make up your mind how to take her.
+I know pretty well what she'll say to you."
+</p><p>
+"Then will you kindly tell me?"
+</p><p>
+She thought a little. "I can't do that. I should
+spoil it. She'll do the best for her own idea."
+</p><p>
+"Her idea, you mean, that I'm a sort of a
+scoundrel; or, at the best, not good enough for
+you?"
+</p><p>
+They were side by side again in their penny chairs,
+and Kate had another pause. "Not good enough
+for <i>her."</i>
+</p><p>
+"Oh, I see. And that's necessary."
+</p><p>
+He put it as a truth rather more than as a question;
+but there had been plenty of truths between
+them that each had contradicted. Kate, however,
+let this one sufficiently pass, only saying the next
+moment: "She has behaved extraordinarily."
+</p><p>
+"And so have we," Densher declared. "I think,
+you know, we've been awfully decent."
+</p><p>
+"For ourselves, for each other, for people in
+general, yes. But not for <i>her.</i> For her," said Kate,
+"we've been monstrous. She has been giving us
+rope. So if she does send for you," the girl repeated,
+"you must know where you are."
+</p><p>
+"That I always know. It's where <i>you</i> are that
+concerns me."
+</p><p>
+"Well," said Kate after an instant, "her idea of
+that is what you'll have from her." He gave her
+a long look, and whatever else people who wouldn't
+let her alone might have wished, for her advancement,
+his long looks were the thing in the world
+she could never have enough of. What she felt was
+that, whatever might happen, she must keep them,
+must make them most completely her possession;
+and it was already strange enough that she reasoned,
+or at all events began to act, as if she might work
+them in with other and alien things, privately cherish
+them, and yet, as regards the rigour of it, pay
+no price. She looked it well in the face, she took
+it intensely home, that they were lovers; she rejoiced
+to herself and, frankly, to him, in their wearing
+of the name; but, distinguished creature that,
+in her way, she was, she took a view of this character
+that scarce squared with the conventional. The
+character itself she insisted on as their right, taking
+that so for granted that it didn't seem even bold;
+but Densher, though he agreed with her, found
+himself moved to wonder at her simplifications, her
+values. Life might prove difficult&mdash;was evidently
+going to; but meanwhile they had each other, and
+that was everything. This was her reasoning, but
+meanwhile, for <i>him,</i> each other was what they didn't
+have, and it was just the point. Repeatedly, however,
+it was a point that, in the face of strange and
+special things, he judged it rather awkwardly gross
+to urge. It was impossible to keep Mrs. Lowder
+out of their scheme. She stood there too close to
+it and too solidly; it had to open a gate, at a given
+point, do what they would to take her in. And she
+came in, always, while they sat together rather helplessly
+watching her, as in a coach-in-four; she drove
+round their prospect as the principal lady at the
+circus drives round the ring, and she stopped the
+coach in the middle to alight with majesty. It was
+our young man's sense that she was magnificently
+vulgar, but yet, quite, that this wasn't all. It wasn't
+with her vulgarity that she felt his want of means,
+though that might have helped her richly to embroider
+it; nor was it with the same infirmity that
+she was strong, original, dangerous.
+</p><p>
+His want of means&mdash;of means sufficient for anyone
+but himself&mdash;was really the great ugliness, and
+was, moreover, at no time more ugly for him than
+when it rose there, as it did seem to rise, shameless,
+face to face with the elements in Kate's life
+colloquially and conveniently classed by both of
+them as funny. He sometimes indeed, for that matter,
+asked himself if these elements were as funny
+as the innermost fact, so often vivid to him, of his
+own consciousness&mdash;his private inability to believe
+he should ever be rich. His conviction on this head
+was in truth quite positive and a thing by itself; he
+failed, after analysis, to understand it, though he
+had naturally more lights on it than any one else.
+He knew how it subsisted in spite of an equal consciousness
+of his being neither mentally nor physically
+quite helpless, neither a dunce nor a cripple;
+he knew it to be absolute, though secret, and also,
+strange to say, about common undertakings, not
+discouraging, not prohibitive. Only now was he
+having to think if it were prohibitive in respect to
+marriage; only now, for the first time, had he to
+weigh his case in scales. The scales, as he sat with
+Kate, often dangled in the line of his vision; he
+saw them, large and black, while he talked or listened,
+take, in the bright air, singular positions.
+Sometimes the right was down and sometimes the
+left; never a happy equipoise&mdash;one or the other
+always kicking the beam. Thus was kept before
+him the question of whether it were more ignoble
+to ask a woman to take her chance with you, or to
+accept it from one's conscience that her chance
+could be at the best but one of the degrees of privation;
+whether, too, otherwise, marrying for money
+mightn't after all be a smaller cause of shame than
+the mere dread of marrying without. Through
+these variations of mood and view, all the same, the
+mark on his forehead stood clear; he saw himself
+remain without whether he married or not. It was
+a line on which his fancy could be admirably active;
+the innumerable ways of making money were beautifully
+present to him; he could have handled them,
+for his newspaper, as easily as he handled everything.
+He was quite aware how he handled everything;
+it was another mark on his forehead; the
+pair of smudges from the thumb of fortune, the
+brand on the passive fleece, dated from the primal
+hour and kept each other company. He wrote, as
+for print, with deplorable ease; since there had been
+nothing to stop him even at the age of ten, so
+there was as little at twenty; it was part of his fate
+in the first place and part of the wretched public's
+in the second. The innumerable ways of making
+money were, no doubt, at all events, what his imagination
+often was busy with after he had tilted
+his chair and thrown back his head with his hands
+clasped behind it. What would most have prolonged
+that attitude, moreover, was the reflection
+that the ways were ways only for others. Within
+the minute, now&mdash;however this might be&mdash;he was
+aware of a nearer view than he had yet quite had
+of those circumstances on his companion's part that
+made least for simplicity of relation. He saw above
+all how she saw them herself, for she spoke of them
+at present with the last frankness, telling him of her
+visit to her father and giving him, in an account of
+her subsequent scene with her sister, an instance of
+how she was perpetually reduced to patching up, in
+one way or another, that unfortunate woman's
+hopes.
+</p><p>
+"The tune," she exclaimed, "to which we're a
+failure as a family!" With which he had it again
+all from her&mdash;and this time, as it seemed to him,
+more than all: the dishonour her father had brought
+them, his folly and cruelty and wickedness; the
+wounded state of her mother, abandoned, despoiled
+and helpless, yet, for the management of such a
+home as remained to them, dreadfully unreasonable
+too; the extinction of her two young brothers&mdash;one,
+at nineteen, the eldest of the house, by typhoid
+fever, contracted at a poisonous little place, as they
+had afterwards found out, that they had taken for
+a summer; the other, the flower of the flock, a
+middy on the <i>Britannia,</i> dreadfully drowned, and
+not even by an accident at sea, but by cramp, unrescued,
+while bathing, too late in the autumn, in
+a wretched little river during a holiday visit to the
+home of a shipmate. Then Marian's unnatural marriage,
+in itself a kind of spiritless turning of the
+other cheek to fortune: her actual wretchedness
+and plaintiveness, her greasy children, her impossible
+claims, her odious visitors&mdash;these things completed
+the proof of the heaviness, for them all, of the
+hand of fate. Kate confessedly described them with
+an excess of impatience; it was much of her charm
+for Densher that she gave in general that turn to
+her descriptions, partly as if to amuse him by free
+and humorous colour, partly&mdash;and that charm was
+the greatest&mdash;as if to work off, for her own relief,
+her constant perception of the incongruity of things.
+She had seen the general show too early and too
+sharply, and she was so intelligent that she knew it
+and allowed for that misfortune; therefore when,
+in talk with him, she was violent and almost unfeminine,
+it was almost as if they had settled, for
+intercourse, on the short cut of the fantastic and
+the happy language of exaggeration. It had come
+to be definite between them at a primary stage that,
+if they could have no other straight way, the realm
+of thought at least was open to them. They could
+think whatever they liked about whatever they
+would&mdash;or, in other words, they could say it. Saying
+it for each other, for each other alone, only
+of course added to the taste. The implication was
+thereby constant that what they said when not together
+had no taste for them at all, and nothing
+could have served more to launch them, at special
+hours, on their small floating island than such an
+assumption that they were only making believe
+everywhere else. Our young man, it must be added,
+was conscious enough that it was Kate who profited
+most by this particular play of the fact of intimacy.
+It always seemed to him that she had more life
+than he to react from, and when she recounted the
+dark disasters of her house and glanced at the hard,
+odd offset of her present exaltation&mdash;since as exaltation
+it was apparently to be considered&mdash;he felt
+his own grey domestic annals to make little show.
+It was naturally, in all such reference, the question
+of her father's character that engaged him most,
+but her picture of her adventure in Chirk Street
+gave him a sense of how little as yet that character
+was clear to him. What was it, to speak plainly, that
+Mr. Croy had originally done?
+</p><p>
+"I don't know&mdash;and I don't want to. I only
+know that years and years ago&mdash;when I was about
+fifteen&mdash;something or other happened that made
+him impossible. I mean impossible for the world at
+large first, and then, little by little, for mother. We
+of course didn't know it at the time," Kate explained,
+"but we knew it later; and it was, oddly
+enough, my sister who first made out that he had
+done something. I can hear her now&mdash;the way,
+one cold, black Sunday morning when, on account
+of an extraordinary fog, we had not gone to church,
+she broke it to me by the school-room fire. I was
+reading a history-book by the lamp&mdash;when we
+didn't go to church we had to read history-books&mdash;and
+I suddenly heard her say, out of the fog, which
+was in the room, and <i>apropos</i> of nothing: 'Papa
+has done something wicked.' And the curious thing
+was that I believed it on the spot and have believed
+it ever since, though she could tell me nothing
+more&mdash;neither what was the wickedness, nor how
+she knew, nor what would happen to him, nor anything
+else about it. We had our sense, always, that
+all sorts of things <i>had</i> happened, were all the while
+happening, to him; so that when Marian only said
+she was sure, tremendously sure, that she had made
+it out for herself, but that that was enough, I took
+her word for it&mdash;it seemed somehow so natural.
+We were not, however, to ask mother&mdash;which made
+it more natural still, and I said never a word. But
+mother, strangely enough, spoke of it to me, in
+time, of her own accord very much later on. He
+hadn't been with us for ever so long, but we were
+used to that. She must have had some fear, some
+conviction that I had an idea, some idea of her own
+that it was the best thing to do. She came out as
+abruptly as Marian had done: 'If you hear anything
+against your father&mdash;anything I mean, except that
+he's odious and vile&mdash;remember it's perfectly false.'
+That was the way I knew&mdash;it was true, though I
+recall that I said to her then that I of course knew
+it wasn't. She might have told me it was true, and
+yet have trusted me to contradict fiercely enough
+any accusation of him that I should meet&mdash;to contradict
+it much more fiercely and effectively, I think,
+than she would have done herself. As it happens,
+however," the girl went on, "I've never had occasion,
+and I've been conscious of it with a sort of surprise.
+It has made the world, at times, seem more
+decent. No one has so much as breathed to me.
+That has been a part of the silence, the silence that
+surrounds him, the silence that, for the world, has
+washed him out. He doesn't exist for people.
+And yet I'm as sure as ever. In fact, though I know
+no more than I did then, I'm more sure. And that,"
+she wound up, "is what I sit here and tell you about
+my own father. If you don't call it a proof of confidence
+I don't know what will satisfy you."
+</p><p>
+"It satisfies me beautifully," Densher declared,
+"but it doesn't, my dear child, very greatly enlighten
+me. You don't, you know, really tell me
+anything. It's so vague that what am I to think
+but that you may very well be mistaken? What
+has he done, if no one can name it?"
+</p><p>
+"He has done everything."
+</p><p>
+"Oh&mdash;everything! Everything's nothing."
+</p><p>
+"Well then," said Kate, "he has done some particular
+thing. It's known&mdash;only, thank God, not
+to us. But it has been the end of him. You could
+doubtless find out with a little trouble. You can
+ask about."
+</p><p>
+Densher for a moment said nothing; but the
+next moment he made it up. "I wouldn't find out
+for the world, and I'd rather lose my tongue than
+put a question."
+</p><p>
+"And yet it's a part of me," said Kate.
+</p><p>
+"A part of you?"
+</p><p>
+"My father's dishonour." Then she sounded
+for him, but more deeply than ever yet, her note
+of proud, still pessimism. "How can such a thing
+as that not be the great thing in one's life?"
+</p><p>
+She had to take from him again, on this, one of
+his long looks, and she took it to its deepest, its
+headiest dregs. "I shall ask you, for the great
+thing in your life," he said, "to depend on <i>me</i> a little
+more." After which, just hesitating, "Doesn't he
+belong to some club?" he inquired.
+</p><p>
+She had a grave headshake. "He used to&mdash;to
+many."
+</p><p>
+"But he has dropped them?"
+</p><p>
+"They've dropped <i>him.</i> Of that I'm sure. It
+ought to do for you. I offered him," the girl immediately
+continued&mdash;"and it was for that I went
+to him&mdash;to come and be with him, make a home
+for him so far as is possible. But he won't hear
+of it."
+</p><p>
+Densher took this in with visible, but generous,
+wonder. "You offered him&mdash;'impossible' as you
+describe him to me&mdash;to live with him and share
+his disadvantages?" The young man saw for the
+moment but the high beauty of it. "You <i>are</i> gallant!"
+</p><p>
+"Because it strikes you as being brave for him?"
+She wouldn't in the least have this. "It wasn't
+courage&mdash;it was the opposite. I did it to save myself&mdash;to
+escape."
+</p><p>
+He had his air, so constant at this stage, as of her
+giving him finer things than any one to think about.
+"Escape from what?"
+</p><p>
+"From everything."
+</p><p>
+"Do you by any chance mean from me?"
+</p><p>
+"No; I spoke to him of you, told him&mdash;or what
+amounted to it&mdash;that I would bring you, if he
+would allow it, with me."
+</p><p>
+"But he won't allow it," said Densher.
+</p><p>
+"Won't hear of it on any terms. He won't help
+me, won't save me, won't hold out a finger to me,"
+Kate went on; "he simply wriggles away, in his
+inimitable manner, and throws me back."
+</p><p>
+"Back then, after all, thank goodness," Densher
+concurred, "on me."
+</p><p>
+But she spoke again as with the sole vision of
+the whole scene she had evoked. "It's a pity, because
+you'd like him. He's wonderful&mdash;he's charming."
+Her companion gave one of the laughs that
+marked in him, again, his feeling in her tone, inveterately,
+something that banished the talk of
+other women, so far as he knew other women, to
+the dull desert of the conventional, and she had already
+continued. "He would make himself delightful
+to you."
+</p><p>
+"Even while objecting to me?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, he likes to please," the girl explained&mdash;"personally.
+He would appreciate you and be
+clever with you. It's to <i>me</i> he objects&mdash;that is as to
+my liking you."
+</p><p>
+"Heaven be praised then," Densher exclaimed,
+"that you like me enough for the objection!"
+</p><p>
+But she met it after an instant with some inconsequence.
+"I don't. I offered to give you up, if
+necessary, to go to him. But it made no difference,
+and that's what I mean," she pursued, "by his declining
+me on any terms. The point is, you see, that
+I don't escape."
+</p><p>
+Densher wondered. "But if you didn't wish to
+escape <i>me?"</i>
+</p><p>
+"I wished to escape Aunt Maud. But he insists
+that it's through her and through her only that I
+may help him; just as Marian insists that it's
+through her, and through her only, that I can help
+<i>her.</i> That's what I mean," she again explained, "by
+their turning me back."
+</p><p>
+The young man thought. "Your sister turns you
+back too?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh, with a push!"
+</p><p>
+"But have you offered to live with your sister?"
+</p><p>
+"I would in a moment if she'd have me. That's
+all my virtue&mdash;a narrow little family feeling. I've
+a small stupid piety&mdash;I don't know what to call
+it." Kate bravely sustained it; she made it out.
+"Sometimes, alone, I've to smother my shrieks
+when I think of my poor mother. She went through
+things&mdash;they pulled her down; I know what they
+were now&mdash;I didn't then, for I was a pig; and my
+position, compared with hers, is an insolence of success.
+That's what Marian keeps before me; that's
+what papa himself, as I say, so inimitably does. My
+position's a value, a great value, for them both"&mdash;she
+followed and followed. Lucid and ironic, she
+knew no merciful muddle. "It's <i>the</i> value&mdash;the only
+one they have."
+</p><p>
+Everything between our young couple moved today,
+in spite of their pauses, their margin, to a
+quicker measure&mdash;the quickness and anxiety playing
+lightning-like in the sultriness. Densher
+watched, decidedly, as he had never done before.
+"And the fact you speak of holds you!"
+</p><p>
+"Of course, it holds me. It's a perpetual sound
+in my ears. It makes me ask myself if I've any
+right to personal happiness, any right to anything
+but to be as rich and overflowing, as smart and
+shining, as I can be made."
+</p><p>
+Densher had a pause. "Oh, you might, with
+good luck, have the personal happiness too."
+</p><p>
+Her immediate answer to this was a silence like
+his own; after which she gave him straight in the
+face, but quite simply and quietly: "Darling!"
+</p><p>
+It took him another moment; then he was also
+quiet and simple. "Will you settle it by our being
+married to-morrow&mdash;as we can, with perfect ease,
+civilly?"
+</p><p>
+"Let us wait to arrange it," Kate presently replied,
+"till after you've seen her."
+</p><p>
+"Do you call that adoring me?" Densher demanded.
+</p><p>
+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."
+</p><p>
+He gave a smile a trifle glassy. "For young persons
+of a great distinction and a very high spirit,
+we're a caution!"
+</p><p>
+"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."
+</p><p>
+It made him break into a laugh which had more
+freedom than his smile. "How you must be afraid
+you'll chuck me!"
+</p><p>
+"No, no, <i>that</i> would be vulgar. But, of course,
+I do see my danger," she admitted, "of doing something
+base."
+</p><p>
+"Then what can be so base as sacrificing me?"
+</p><p>
+"I <i>shan't</i> 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."
+</p><p>
+"For 'them'?" and the young man strongly, extravagantly
+marked his coldness. "Thank you!"
+</p><p>
+"Don't you care for them?"
+</p><p>
+"Why should I? What are they to me but a
+serious nuisance?"
+</p><p>
+As soon as he had permitted himself this qualification
+of the unfortunate persons she so perversely
+cherished, he repented of his roughness&mdash;and partly
+because he expected a flash from her. But it was
+one of her finest sides that she sometimes flashed
+with a mere mild glow. "I don't see why you
+don't make out a little more that if we avoid stupidity
+we may do <i>all.</i> We may keep her."
+</p><p>
+He stared. "Make her pension us?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, wait at least till we have seen."
+</p><p>
+He thought. "Seen what can be got out of
+her?"
+</p><p>
+Kate for a moment said nothing. "After all I
+never asked her; never, when our troubles were
+at the worst, appealed to her nor went near her.
+She fixed upon me herself, settled on me with her
+wonderful gilded claws."
+</p><p>
+"You speak," Densher observed, "as if she were
+a vulture."
+</p><p>
+"Call it an eagle&mdash;with a gilded beak as well, and
+with wings for great flights. If she's a thing of
+the air, in short&mdash;say at once a balloon&mdash;I never
+myself got into her car. I was her choice."
+</p><p>
+It had really, her sketch of the affair, a high colour
+and a great style; at all of which he gazed a
+minute as at a picture by a master. "What she
+must see in you!"
+</p><p>
+"Wonders!" And, speaking it loud, she stood
+straight up. "Everything. There it is."
+</p><p>
+Yes, there it was, and as she remained before
+him he continued to face it. "So that what you
+mean is that I'm to do my part in somehow squaring
+her?"
+</p><p>
+"See her, see her," Kate said with impatience.
+</p><p>
+"And grovel to her?"
+</p><p>
+"Ah, do what you like!" And she walked in
+her impatience away.
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">IV</h2>
+<br><br>
+<p>
+His eyes had followed her at this time quite long
+enough, before he overtook her, to make out more
+than ever, in the poise of her head, the pride of her
+step&mdash;he didn't know what best to call it&mdash;a part,
+at least, of Mrs. Lowder's reasons. He consciously
+winced while he figured his presenting himself as
+a reason opposed to these; though, at the same
+moment, with the source of Aunt Maud's inspiration
+thus before him, he was prepared to conform,
+by almost any abject attitude or profitable compromise,
+to his companion's easy injunction. He
+would do as <i>she</i> liked&mdash;his own liking might come
+off as it would. He would help her to the utmost
+of his power; for, all the rest of that day and the
+next, her easy injunction, tossed off that way as
+she turned her beautiful back, was like the crack
+of a great whip in the blue air, the high element in
+which Mrs. Lowder hung. He wouldn't grovel
+perhaps&mdash;he wasn't quite ready for that; but he
+would be patient, ridiculous, reasonable, unreasonable,
+and above all deeply diplomatic. He would
+be clever, with all his cleverness&mdash;which he now
+shook hard, as he sometimes shook his poor, dear,
+shabby, old watch, to start it up again. It wasn't,
+thank goodness, as if there weren't plenty of that,
+and with what they could muster between them it
+would be little to the credit of their star, however
+pale, that defeat and surrender&mdash;surrender so early,
+so immediate&mdash;should have to ensue. It was not
+indeed that he thought of that disaster as, at the
+worst, a direct sacrifice of their possibilities: he imaged&mdash;it
+which was enough as some proved vanity,
+some exposed fatuity, in the idea of bringing
+Mrs. Lowder round. When, shortly afterwards, in
+this lady's vast drawing-room&mdash;the apartments at
+Lancaster Gate had struck him from the first as of
+prodigious extent&mdash;he awaited her, at her request,
+conveyed in a "reply-paid" telegram, his theory
+was that of their still clinging to their idea, though
+with a sense of the difficulty of it really enlarged to
+the scale of the place.
+</p><p>
+He had the place for a long time&mdash;it seemed to
+him a quarter of an hour&mdash;to himself; and while
+Aunt Maud kept him and kept him, while observation
+and reflection crowded on him, he asked himself
+what was to be expected of a person who could
+treat one like that. The visit, the hour were of
+her own proposing, so that her delay, no doubt,
+was but part of a general plan of putting him to
+inconvenience. As he walked to and fro, however,
+taking in the message of her massive, florid furniture,
+the immense expression of her signs and symbols,
+he had as little doubt of the inconvenience he
+was prepared to suffer. He found himself even facing
+the thought that he had nothing to fall back
+on, and that that was as great a humiliation in a
+good cause as a proud man could desire. It had
+not yet been so distinct to him that he made no
+show&mdash;literally not the smallest; so complete a
+show seemed made there all about him; so almost
+abnormally affirmative, so aggressively erect, were
+the huge, heavy objects that syllabled his hostess
+story. "When all's said and done, you know, she's
+colossally vulgar"&mdash;he had once all but said that
+of Mrs. Lowder to her niece; only just keeping it
+back at the last, keeping it to himself with all its
+danger about it. It mattered because it bore so
+directly, and he at all events quite felt it a thing that
+Kate herself would some day bring out to him. It
+bore directly at present, and really all the more that
+somehow, strangely, it didn't in the least imply that
+Aunt Maud was dull or stale. She was vulgar with
+freshness, almost with beauty, since there was
+beauty, to a degree, in the play of so big and bold
+a temperament. She was in fine quite the largest
+possible quantity to deal with; and he was in the
+cage of the lioness without his whip&mdash;the whip, in a
+word, of a supply of proper retorts. He had no
+retort but that he loved the girl&mdash;which in such a
+house as that was painfully cheap. Kate had mentioned
+to him more than once that her aunt was
+Passionate, speaking of it as a kind of offset and
+uttering it as with a capital P, marking it as something
+that he might, that he in fact ought to, turn
+about in some way to their advantage. He wondered
+at this hour to what advantage he could turn
+it; but the case grew less simple the longer he
+waited. Decidedly there was something he hadn't
+enough of. He stood as one fast.
+</p><p>
+His slow march to and fro seemed to give him
+the very measure; as he paced and paced the distance
+it became the desert of his poverty; at the
+sight of which expanse moreover he could pretend
+to himself as little as before that the desert looked
+redeemable. Lancaster Gate looked rich&mdash;that was
+all the effect; which it was unthinkable that any
+state of his own should ever remotely resemble. He
+read more vividly, more critically, as has been
+hinted, the appearances about him; and they did
+nothing so much as make him wonder at his aesthetic
+reaction. He hadn't known&mdash;and in spite
+of Kate's repeated reference to her own rebellions
+of taste&mdash;that he should "mind" so much how an
+independent lady might decorate her house. It was
+the language of the house itself that spoke to him,
+writing out for him, with surpassing breadth and
+freedom, the associations and conceptions, the
+ideals and possibilities of the mistress. Never, he
+flattered himself, had he seen anything so gregariously
+ugly&mdash;operatively, ominously so cruel. He
+was glad to have found this last name for the whole
+character; "cruel" somehow played into the subject
+for an article&mdash;that his impression put straight
+into his mind. He would write about the heavy
+horrors that could still flourish, that lifted their
+undiminished heads, in an age so proud of its short
+way with false gods; and it would be funny if what
+he should have got from Mrs. Lowder were to
+prove, after all, but a small amount of copy. Yet
+the great thing, really the dark thing, was that, even
+while he thought of the quick column he might
+add up, he felt it less easy to laugh at the heavy
+horrors than to quail before them. He couldn't
+describe and dismiss them collectively, call them
+either Mid-Victorian or Early; not being at all sure
+they were rangeable under one rubric. It was only
+manifest they were splendid and were furthermore
+conclusively British. They constituted an order and
+they abounded in rare material&mdash;precious woods,
+metals, stuffs, stones. He had never dreamed of
+anything so fringed and scalloped, so buttoned and
+corded, drawn everywhere so tight, and curled
+everywhere so thick. He had never dreamed of so
+much gilt and glass, so much satin and plush, so
+much rosewood and marble and malachite. But it
+was, above all, the solid forms, the wasted finish,
+the misguided cost, the general attestation of morality
+and money, a good conscience and a big balance.
+These things finally represented for him a
+portentous negation of his own world of thought&mdash;of
+which, for that matter, in the presence of them,
+he became as for the first time hopelessly aware.
+They revealed it to him by their merciless difference.
+His interview with Aunt Maud, none the less,
+took by no means the turn he had expected. Passionate
+though her nature, no doubt Mrs. Lowder,
+on this occasion, neither threatened nor appealed.
+Her arms of aggression, her weapons of defence,
+were presumably close at hand, but she left them
+untouched and unmentioned, and was in fact so
+bland that he properly perceived only afterwards
+how adroit she had been. He properly perceived
+something else as well, which complicated his case;
+he shouldn't have known what to call it if he hadn't
+called it her really imprudent good-nature. Her
+blandness, in other words, was not mere policy&mdash;he
+wasn't dangerous enough for policy; it was the result,
+he could see, of her fairly liking him a little.
+From the moment she did that she herself became
+more interesting; and who knew what might happen
+should he take to liking <i>her?</i> Well, it was a
+risk he naturally must face. She fought him, at
+any rate, but with one hand, with a few loose grains
+of stray powder. He recognised at the end of ten
+minutes, and even without her explaining it, that
+if she had made him wait it had not been to wound
+him; they had by that time almost directly met
+on the fact of her intention. She had wanted him
+to think for himself of what she proposed to say
+to him&mdash;not having otherwise announced it;
+wanted to let it come home to him on the spot, as
+she had shrewdly believed it would. Her first question,
+on appearing, had practically been as to
+whether he hadn't taken her hint, and this inquiry
+assumed so many things that it made discussion, immediately,
+frank and large. He knew, with the
+question put, that the hint was just what he <i>had</i>
+taken; knew that she had made him quickly forgive
+her the display of her power; knew that if he didn't
+take care he should understand her, and the
+strength of her purpose, to say nothing of that of
+her imagination, nothing of the length of her purse,
+only too well. Yet he pulled himself up with the
+thought, too, that he was not going to be afraid of
+understanding her; he was just going to understand
+and understand without detriment to the feeblest,
+even, of his passions. The play of one's mind let
+one in, at the best, dreadfully, in action, in the need
+of action, where simplicity was all; but when one
+couldn't prevent it the thing was to make it complete.
+There would never be mistakes but for the
+original fun of mistakes. What he must use his
+fatal intelligence for was to resist. Mrs. Lowder,
+meanwhile, might use it for whatever she liked.
+</p><p>
+It was after she had begun her statement of her
+own idea about Kate that he began, on his side, to
+reflect that&mdash;with her manner of offering it as really
+sufficient if he would take the trouble to embrace&mdash;it
+she couldn't half hate him. That was all, positively,
+she seemed to show herself for the time as
+attempting; clearly, if she did her intention justice,
+she would have nothing more disagreeable to
+do. "If I hadn't been ready to go very much
+further, you understand, I wouldn't have gone so
+far. I don't care what you repeat to her&mdash;the more
+you repeat to her, perhaps the better; and, at any
+rate, there's nothing she doesn't already know. I
+don't say it for her; I say it for you&mdash;when I want
+to reach my niece I know how to do it straight."
+So Aunt Maud delivered herself&mdash;as with homely
+benevolence, in the simplest, but the clearest terms;
+virtually conveying that, though a word to the wise
+was, doubtless, in spite of the advantage, <i>not</i> always
+enough, a word to the good could never fail to be.
+The sense our young man read into her words was
+that she liked him because he was good&mdash;was really,
+by her measure, good enough: good enough, that
+is, to give up her niece for her and go his way in
+peace. But <i>was</i> he good enough&mdash;by his own
+measure? He fairly wondered, while she more fully
+expressed herself, if it might be his doom to prove
+so. "She's the finest possible creature&mdash;of course
+you flatter yourself that you know it. But I know
+it, quite as well as you possibly can&mdash;by which I
+mean a good deal better yet; and the tune to which
+I'm ready to prove my faith compares favourably
+enough, I think, with anything <i>you</i> can do. I don't
+say it because she's my niece&mdash;that's nothing to me:
+I might have had fifty nieces, and I wouldn't have
+brought one of them to this place if I hadn't found
+her to my taste. I don't say I wouldn't have done
+something else, but I wouldn't have put up with
+her presence. Kate's presence, by good fortune,
+I marked early; Kate's presence&mdash;unluckily for <i>you</i>&mdash;is
+everything I could possibly wish; Kate's presence
+is, in short, as fine as you know, and I've been
+keeping it for the comfort of my declining years.
+I've watched it long; I've been saving it up and
+letting it, as you say of investments, appreciate, and
+you may judge whether, now it has begun to pay
+so, I'm likely to consent to treat for it with any
+but a high bidder. I can do the best with her, and
+I've my idea of the best."
+</p><p>
+"Oh, I quite conceive," said Densher, "that your
+idea of the best isn't me."
+</p><p>
+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. "I didn't ask
+you to come to hear what it isn't&mdash;I asked you to
+come to hear what it is."
+</p><p>
+"Of course," Densher laughed, "it's very great
+indeed."
+</p><p>
+His hostess went on as if his contribution to the
+subject were barely relevant. "I want to see her
+high, high up&mdash;high up and in the light."
+</p><p>
+"Ah, you naturally want to marry her to a duke,
+and are eager to smooth away any hitch."
+</p><p>
+She gave him so, on this, the mere effect of the
+drawn blind that it quite forced him, at first, into the
+sense, possibly just, of having affected her as flippant,
+perhaps even as low. He had been looked
+at so, in blighted moments of presumptuous youth,
+by big cold public men, but never, so far as he
+could recall, by any private lady. More than anything
+yet it gave him the measure of his companion's
+subtlety, and thereby of Kate's possible career.
+"Don't be <i>too</i> impossible!"&mdash;he feared from his
+friend, for a moment, some such answer as that;
+and then felt, as she spoke otherwise, as if she were
+letting him off easily. "I want her to marry a great
+man." That was all; but, more and more, it was
+enough; and if it hadn't been her next words would
+have made it so. "And I think of her what I think.
+There you are."
+</p><p>
+They sat for a little face to face upon it, and he
+was conscious of something deeper still, of something
+she wished him to understand if he only
+would. To that extent she did appeal&mdash;appealed
+to the intelligence she desired to show she believed
+him to possess. He was meanwhile, at all events,
+not the man wholly to fail of comprehension. "Of
+course I'm aware how little I can answer to any
+fond, proud dream. You've a view&mdash;a magnificent
+one; into which I perfectly enter. I thoroughly understand
+what I'm not, and I'm much obliged to
+you for not reminding me of it in any rougher
+way." She said nothing&mdash;she kept that up; it
+might even have been to let him go further, if he
+was capable of it, in the way of poorness of spirit.
+It was one of those cases in which a man couldn't
+show, if he showed at all, save for poor; unless
+indeed he preferred to show for asinine. It was
+the plain truth: he <i>was</i>&mdash;on Mrs. Lowder's basis,
+the only one in question&mdash;a very small quantity,
+and he did know, damnably, what made quantities
+large. He desired to be perfectly simple; yet in
+the midst of that effort a deeper apprehension
+throbbed. Aunt Maud clearly conveyed it, though
+he couldn't later on have said how. "You don't
+really matter, I believe, so much as you think, and
+I'm not going to make you a martyr by banishing
+you. Your performances with Kate in the Park are
+ridiculous so far as they're meant as consideration
+for me; and I had much rather see you myself&mdash;since
+you're, in your way, my dear young man, delightful&mdash;and
+arrange with you, count with you,
+as I easily, as I perfectly should. Do you suppose
+me so stupid as to quarrel with you if it's not really
+necessary? It won't&mdash;it would be too absurd!&mdash;<i>be</i>
+necessary. I can bite your head off any day, any day
+I really open my mouth; and I'm dealing with
+you now, see&mdash;and successfully judge&mdash;without
+opening it. I do things handsomely all round&mdash;I
+place you in the presence of the plan with which,
+from the moment it's a case of taking you seriously,
+you're incompatible. Come then as near it as you
+like, walk all round it&mdash;don't be afraid you'll hurt
+it!&mdash;and live on with it before you."
+</p><p>
+He afterwards felt that if she hadn't absolutely
+phrased all this it was because she so soon made
+him out as going with her far enough. He was so
+pleasantly affected by her asking no promise of him,
+her not proposing he should pay for her indulgence
+by his word of honour not to interfere, that he gave
+her a kind of general assurance of esteem. Immediately
+afterwards, then, he spoke of these things
+to Kate, and what then came back to him first of
+all was the way he had said to her&mdash;he mentioned
+it to the girl&mdash;very much as one of a pair of lovers
+says in a rupture by mutual consent: "I hope immensely,
+of course, that you'll always regard me as
+a friend." This had perhaps been going far&mdash;he
+submitted it all to Kate; but really there had been
+so much in it that it was to be looked at, as they
+might say, wholly in its own light. Other things
+than those we have presented had come up before
+the close of his scene with Aunt Maud, but this matter
+of her not treating him as a peril of the first
+order easily predominated. There was moreover
+plenty to talk about on the occasion of his subsequent
+passage with our young woman, it having
+been put to him abruptly, the night before, that he
+might give himself a lift and do his newspaper a
+service&mdash;so flatteringly was the case expressed&mdash;by
+going, for fifteen or twenty weeks, to America.
+The idea of a series of letters from the United States
+from the strictly social point of view had for some
+time been nursed in the inner sanctuary at whose
+door he sat, and the moment was now deemed
+happy for letting it loose. The imprisoned thought
+had, in a word, on the opening of the door, flown
+straight out into Densher's face, or perched at least
+on his shoulder, making him look up in surprise
+from his mere inky office-table. His account of
+the matter to Kate was that he couldn't refuse&mdash;not
+being in a position, as yet, to refuse anything; but
+that his being chosen for such an errand confounded
+his sense of proportion. He was definite as to his
+scarce knowing how to measure the honour, which
+struck him as equivocal; he had not quite supposed
+himself the man for the class of job. This confused
+consciousness, he intimated, he had promptly
+enough betrayed to his manager; with the effect,
+however, of seeing the question surprisingly clear
+up. What it came to was that the sort of twaddle
+that was not in his chords was, unexpectedly, just
+what they happened this time not to want. They
+wanted his letters, for queer reasons, about as good
+as he could let them come; he was to play his own
+little tune and not be afraid; that was the whole
+point.
+</p><p>
+It would have been the whole, that is, had there
+not been a sharper one still in the circumstance that
+he was to start at once. His mission, as they called
+it at the office, would probably be over by the end
+of June, which was desirable; but to bring that
+about he must now not lose a week; his inquiries,
+he understood, were to cover the whole ground,
+and there were reasons of State&mdash;reasons operating
+at the seat of empire in Fleet Street&mdash;why the nail
+should be struck on the head. Densher made no
+secret to Kate of his having asked for a day to decide;
+and his account of that matter was that he
+felt he owed it to her to speak to her first. She
+assured him on this that nothing so much as that
+scruple had yet shown her how they were bound
+together; she was clearly proud of his letting a
+thing of such importance depend on her; but she
+was clearer still as to his instant duty. She rejoiced
+in his prospect and urged him to his task; she
+should miss him intensely&mdash;of course she should
+miss him; but she made so little of it that she spoke
+with jubilation of what he would see and would
+do. She made so much of this last quantity that he
+laughed at her innocence, though also with scarce
+the heart to give her the real size of his drop in
+the daily bucket. He was struck at the same time
+with her happy grasp of what had really occurred
+in Fleet Street&mdash;all the more that it was his own
+final reading. He was to pull the subject up&mdash;that
+was just what they wanted; and it would take
+more than all the United States together, visit them
+each as he might, to let <i>him</i> down. It was just
+because he didn't nose about and wasn't the usual
+gossipmonger that they had picked him out; it
+was a branch of their correspondence with which
+they evidently wished a new tone associated, such
+a tone as, from now on, it would have always to
+take from his example.
+</p><p>
+"How you ought indeed, when you understand
+so well, to be a journalist's wife!" Densher exclaimed
+in admiration, even while she struck him
+as fairly hurrying him off.
+</p><p>
+But she was almost impatient of the praise.
+"What do you expect one <i>not</i> to understand when
+one cares for you?"
+</p><p>
+"Ah then, I'll put it otherwise and say 'How
+much you care for me!'"
+</p><p>
+"Yes," she assented; "it fairly redeems my stupidity.
+I <i>shall,</i> with a chance to show it," she added,
+"have some imagination for you."
+</p><p>
+She spoke of the future this time as so little
+contingent, that he felt a queerness of conscience
+in making her the report that he presently arrived
+at on what had passed for him with the real
+arbiter of their destiny. The way for that had been
+blocked a little by his news from Fleet Street; but
+in the crucible of their happy discussion this element
+soon melted into the other, and in the mixture that
+ensued the parts were not to be distinguished. The
+young man moreover, before taking his leave, was
+to see why Kate had just spoken of the future as
+if they now really possessed it, and was to come to
+the vision by a devious way that deepened the final
+cheer. Their faces were turned to the illumined
+quarter as soon as he had answered her question in
+respect to the appearance of their being able to
+play a waiting game with success. It was for the
+possibility of that appearance that she had, a few
+days before, so earnestly pressed him to see her
+aunt; and if after his hour with that lady it had
+not struck Densher that he had seen her to the
+happiest purpose the poor facts flushed with a better
+meaning as Kate, one by one, took them up.
+</p><p>
+"If she consents to your coming, why isn't that
+everything?"
+</p><p>
+"It <i>is</i> everything; everything <i>she</i> thinks it. It's
+the probability&mdash;I mean as Mrs. Lowder measures
+probability&mdash;that I may be prevented from becoming
+a complication for her by some arrangement,
+<i>any</i> arrangement, through which you shall see me
+often and easily. She's sure of my want of money,
+and that gives her time. She believes in my having
+a certain amount of delicacy, in my wishing to better
+my state before I put the pistol to your head
+in respect to sharing it. The time that will take
+figures for her as the time that will help her if she
+doesn't spoil her chance by treating me badly. She
+doesn't at all wish moreover," Densher went on,
+"to treat me badly, for I believe, upon my honour,
+funny as it may sound to you, that she personally
+rather likes me, and that if you weren't in question
+I might almost become her pet young man. She
+doesn't disparage intellect and culture&mdash;quite the
+contrary; she wants them to adorn her board and
+be named in her programme; and I'm sure it has
+sometimes cost her a real pang that I should be so
+desirable, at once, and so impossible." He paused
+a moment, and his companion then saw that a
+strange smile was in his face&mdash;a smile as strange
+even as the adjunct, in her own, of this informing
+vision. "I quite suspect her of believing that, if
+the truth were known, she likes me literally better
+than&mdash;deep down&mdash;you yourself do: wherefore she
+does me the honour to think that I may be safely
+left to kill my own cause. There, as I say, comes in
+her margin. I'm not the sort of stuff of romance
+that wears, that washes, that survives use, that resists
+familiarity. Once in any degree admit that,
+and your pride and prejudice will take care of the
+rest! the pride fed full, meanwhile, by the system
+she means to practise with you, and the prejudice
+excited by the comparison she'll enable you to
+make, from which I shall come off badly. She likes
+me, but she'll never like me so much as when she
+succeeded a little better in making me look
+wretched. For then <i>you'll</i> like me less."
+</p><p>
+Kate showed for this evocation a due interest,
+but no alarm; and it was a little as if to pay his
+tender cynicism back in kind that she after an instant
+replied: "I see, I see; what an immense affair
+she must think me! One was aware, but you
+deepen the impression."
+</p><p>
+"I think you'll make no mistake," said Densher,
+"in letting it go as deep as it will."
+</p><p>
+He had given her indeed, she made no scruple of
+showing, plenty to consider. "Her facing the
+music, her making you boldly as welcome as you
+say&mdash;that's an awfully big theory, you know, and
+worthy of all the other big things that, in one's
+acquaintance with people, give her a place so apart."
+</p><p>
+"Oh, she's grand," the young man conceded;
+"she's on the scale, altogether, of the car of Juggernaut
+which was a kind of image that came to
+me yesterday while I waited for her at Lancaster
+Gate. The things in your drawing-room there
+were like the forms of the strange idols, the mystic
+excrescences, with which one may suppose the front
+of the car to bristle."
+</p><p>
+"Yes, aren't they?" the girl returned; and they
+had, over all that aspect of their wonderful lady,
+one of those deep and free interchanges that made
+everything but confidence a false note for them.
+There were complications, there were questions;
+but they were so much more together than they
+were anything else. Kate uttered for a while no
+word of refutation of Aunt Maud's "big" diplomacy,
+and they left it there, as they would have left
+any other fine product, for a monument to her
+powers. But, Densher related further, he had had
+in other respects too the car of Juggernaut to face;
+he omitted nothing from his account of his visit,
+least of all the way Aunt Maud had frankly at last&mdash;though
+indeed only under artful pressure&mdash;fallen
+foul of his very type, his want of the right marks,
+his foreign accidents, his queer antecedents. She
+had told him he was but half a Briton, which, he
+granted Kate, would have been dreadful if he hadn't
+so let himself in for it.
+</p><p>
+"I was really curious, you see," he explained,
+"to find out from her what sort of queer creature,
+what sort of social anomaly, in the light of such conventions
+as hers, such an education as mine makes
+one pass for."
+</p><p>
+Kate said nothing for a little; but then, "Why
+should you care?" she asked.
+</p><p>
+"Oh," he laughed, "I like her so much; and
+then, for a man of my trade, her views, her spirit,
+are essentially a thing to get hold of; they belong
+to the great public mind that we meet at every turn
+and that we must keep setting up 'codes' with.
+Besides," he added, "I want to please her personally."
+</p><p>
+"Ah, yes, we must please her personally!" his
+companion echoed; and the words may represent
+all their definite recognition, at the time, of Densher's
+politic gain. They had in fact between this
+and his start for New York many matters to handle,
+and the question he now touched upon came
+up for Kate above all. She looked at him as if he
+had really told her aunt more of his immediate personal
+story than he had ever told herself. That,
+if it were so, was an accident, and it put him, for
+half an hour, on as much of the picture of his early
+years abroad, his migratory parents, his Swiss
+schools, his German university, as she had easy
+attention for. A man, he intimated, a man of their
+world, would have spotted him straight as to many
+of these points; a man of their world, so far as
+they had a world, would have been through the
+English mill. But it was none the less charming
+to make his confession to a woman; women had,
+in fact, for such differences, so much more imagination.
+Kate showed at present all his case could require;
+when she had had it from beginning to end
+she declared that she now made out more than ever
+yet of what she loved him for. She had herself,
+as a child, lived with some continuity in the world
+across the Channel, coming home again still a child;
+and had participated after that, in her teens, in her
+mother's brief but repeated retreats to Dresden, to
+Florence, to Biarritz, weak and expensive attempts
+at economy from which there stuck to her&mdash;though
+in general coldly expressed, through the instinctive
+avoidance of cheap raptures&mdash;the religion of foreign
+things. When it was revealed to her how
+many more foreign things were in Merton Densher
+than he had hitherto taken the trouble to catalogue,
+she almost faced him as if he were a map of the
+continent or a handsome present of a delightful
+new "Murray." He hadn't meant to swagger, he
+had rather meant to plead, though with Mrs. Lowder
+he had meant also a little to explain. His
+father had been, in strange countries, in twenty settlements
+of the English, British chaplain, resident
+or occasional, and had had for years the unusual
+luck of never wanting a billet. His career abroad
+had therefore been unbroken, and, as his stipend
+had never been great, he had educated his children
+at the smallest cost, in the schools nearest; which
+was also a saving of railway fares. Densher's
+mother, it further appeared, had practised on her
+side a distinguished industry, to the success of which&mdash;so
+far as success ever crowned it&mdash;this period of
+exile had much contributed: she copied, patient
+lady, famous pictures in great museums, having
+begun with a happy natural gift and taking in betimes
+the scale of her opportunity. Copyists abroad
+of course swarmed, but Mrs. Densher had had a
+sense and a hand of her own, had arrived at a perfection
+that persuaded, that even deceived, and that
+made the disposal of her work blissfully usual. Her
+son, who had lost her, held her image sacred, and
+the effect of his telling Kate all about her, as well
+as about other matters until then mixed and dim,
+was to render his history rich, his sources full, his
+outline anything but common. He had come
+round, he had come back, he insisted abundantly, to
+being a Briton: his Cambridge years, his happy
+connection, as it had proved, with his father's college,
+amply certified to that, to say nothing of his
+subsequent plunge into London, which filled up
+the measure. But brave enough though his descent
+to English earth, he had passed, by the way, through
+zones of air that had left their ruffle on his wings,
+had been exposed to initiations ineffaceable. Something
+had happened to him that could never be
+undone.
+</p><p>
+When Kate Croy said to him as much he besought
+her not to insist, declaring that this indeed
+was what was too much the matter with him, that
+he had been but too probably spoiled for native, for
+insular use. On which, not unnaturally, she insisted
+the more, assuring him, without mitigation, that if
+he was complicated and brilliant she wouldn't for
+the world have had him any thing less; so that he
+was reduced in the end to accusing her of putting
+the dreadful truth to him in the hollow guise of
+flattery. She was making out how abnormal he was
+in order that she might eventually find him impossible;
+and, as she could fully make it out but
+with his aid, she had to bribe him by feigned delight
+to help her. If her last word for him, in the
+connection, was that the way he saw himself was
+just a precious proof the more of his having tasted
+of the tree and being thereby prepared to assist her
+to eat, this gives the happy tone of their whole
+talk, the measure of the flight of time in the near
+presence of his settled departure. Kate showed,
+however, that she was to be more literally taken
+when she spoke of the relief Aunt Maud would draw
+from the prospect of his absence.
+</p><p>
+"Yet one can scarcely see why," he replied,
+"when she fears me so little."
+</p><p>
+His friend weighed his objection. "Your idea
+is that she likes you so much that she'll even go so
+far as to regret losing you?"
+</p><p>
+Well, he saw it in their constant comprehensive
+way. "Since what she builds on is the gradual
+process of your alienation, she may take the view
+that the process constantly requires me. Mustn't
+I be there to keep it going? It's in my exile that
+it may languish."
+</p><p>
+He went on with that fantasy, but at this point
+Kate ceased to attend. He saw after a little that
+she had been following some thought of her own,
+and he had been feeling the growth of something
+determinant even through the extravagance of
+much of the pleasantry, the warm, transparent irony,
+into which their livelier intimacy kept plunging like
+a confident swimmer. Suddenly she said to him
+with extraordinary beauty: "I engage myself to
+you for ever."
+</p><p>
+The beauty was in everything, and he could have
+separated nothing&mdash;couldn't have thought of her
+face as distinct from the whole joy. Yet her face
+had a new light. "And I pledge you&mdash;I call God
+to witness!&mdash;every spark of my faith; I give you
+every drop of my life." That was all, for the moment,
+but it was enough, and it was almost as quiet
+as if it were nothing. They were in the open air,
+in an alley of the Gardens; the great space, which
+seemed to arch just then higher and spread wider
+for them, threw them back into deep concentration.
+They moved by a common instinct to a spot,
+within sight, that struck them as fairly sequestered,
+and there, before their time together was spent,
+they had extorted from concentration every advance
+it could make them. They had exchanged
+vows and tokens, sealed their rich compact, solemnized,
+so far as breathed words and murmured sounds
+and lighted eyes and clasped hands could do it, their
+agreement to belong only, and to belong tremendously,
+to each other. They were to leave the place
+accordingly an affianced couple; but before they
+left it other things still had passed. Densher had
+declared his horror of bringing to a premature end
+her happy relation with her aunt; and they had
+worked round together to a high level of wisdom
+and patience. Kate's free profession was that she
+wished not to deprive <i>him</i> of Mrs. Lowder's countenance,
+which, in the long run, she was convinced
+he would continue to enjoy; and as, by a blessed
+turn, Aunt Maud had demanded of him no promise
+that would tie his hands, they should be able to
+cultivate their destiny in their own way and yet remain
+loyal. One difficulty alone stood out, which
+Densher named.
+</p><p>
+"Of course it will never do&mdash;we must remember
+that&mdash;from the moment you allow her to found
+hopes of you for any one else in particular. So
+long as her view is content to remain as general as
+at present appears, I don't see that we deceive her.
+At a given moment, you see, she must be undeceived:
+the only thing therefore is to be ready for
+the moment and to face it. Only, after all, in that
+case," the young man observed, "one doesn't quite
+make out what we shall have got from her."
+</p><p>
+"What she'll have got from <i>us?"</i> Kate inquired
+with a smile. "What she'll have got from us," the
+girl went on, "is her own affair&mdash;it's for <i>her</i> to
+measure. I asked her for nothing," she added; "I
+never put myself upon her. She must take her
+risks, and she surely understands them. What we
+shall have got from her is what we've already spoken
+of," Kate further explained; "it's that we shall
+have gained time. And so, for that matter, will
+she."
+</p><p>
+Densher gazed a little at all this clearness; his
+gaze was not at the present hour into romantic obscurity.
+"Yes; no doubt, in our particular situation,
+time's everything. And then there's the joy
+of it."
+</p><p>
+She hesitated. "Of our secret?"
+</p><p>
+"Not so much perhaps of our secret in itself, but
+of what's represented and, as we must somehow
+feel, protected and made deeper and closer by it."
+And his fine face, relaxed into happiness, covered
+her with all his meaning. "Our being as we
+are."
+</p><p>
+It was as if for a moment she let the meaning sink
+into her. "So gone?"
+</p><p>
+"So gone. So extremely gone. However," he
+smiled, "we shall go a good deal further." Her
+answer to which was only the softness of her silence&mdash;a
+silence that looked out for them both at the far
+reach of their prospect. This was immense, and
+they thus took final possession of it. They were
+practically united and they were splendidly strong;
+but there were other things&mdash;things they were precisely
+strong enough to be able successfully to
+count with and safely to allow for; in consequence
+of which they would, for the present, subject to
+some better reason, keep their understanding to
+themselves. It was not indeed, however, till after
+one more observation of Densher's that they felt
+the question completely straightened out. "The
+only thing of course is that she may any day absolutely
+put it to you."
+</p><p>
+Kate considered. "Ask me where, on my honour,
+we are? She may, naturally; but I doubt if
+in fact she will. While you're away she'll make the
+most of it. She'll leave me alone."
+</p><p>
+"But there'll be my letters."
+</p><p>
+The girl faced his letters. "Very, very many?"
+</p><p>
+"Very, very, very many&mdash;more than ever; and
+you know what that is! And then," Densher added,
+"there'll be yours."
+</p><p>
+"Oh, I shan't leave mine on the hall-table. I
+shall post them myself."
+</p><p>
+He looked at her a moment. "Do you think
+then I had best address you elsewhere?" After
+which, before she could quite answer, he added
+with some emphasis: "I'd rather not, you know.
+It's straighter."
+</p><p>
+She might again have just waited. "Of course
+it's straighter. Don't be afraid I shan't be straight.
+Address me," she continued, "where you like. I
+shall be proud enough of its being known you write
+to me."
+</p><p>
+He turned it over for the last clearness. "Even
+at the risk of its really bringing down the inquisition?"
+</p><p>
+Well, the last clearness now filled her. "I'm not
+afraid of the inquisition. If she asks if there's anything
+definite between us, I know perfectly what I
+shall say."
+</p><p>
+"That I <i>am,</i> of course, 'gone' for you?"
+</p><p>
+"That I love you as I shall never in my life love
+any one else, and that she can make what she likes
+of that." She said it out so splendidly that it was
+like a new profession of faith, the fulness of a tide
+breaking through; and the effect of that, in turn,
+was to make her companion meet her with such eyes
+that she had time again before he could otherwise
+speak. "Besides, she's just as likely to ask <i>you."</i>
+</p><p>
+"Not while I'm away."
+</p><p>
+"Then when you come back."
+</p><p>
+"Well then," said Densher, "we shall have had
+our particular joy. But what I feel is," he candidly
+added, "that, by an idea of her own, her superior
+policy, she <i>won't</i> ask me. She'll let me off. I
+shan't have to lie to her."
+</p><p>
+"It will be left all to me?" asked Kate.
+</p><p>
+"All to you!" he tenderly laughed.
+</p><p>
+But it was, oddly, the very next moment as if he
+had perhaps been a shade too candid. His discrimination
+seemed to mark a possible, a natural
+reality, a reality not wholly disallowed by the account
+the girl had just given of her own intention.
+There <i>was</i> a difference in the air&mdash;even if none
+other than the supposedly usual difference in truth
+between man and woman; and it was almost as if
+the sense of this provoked her. She seemed to
+cast about an instant, and then she went back a little
+resentfully to something she had suffered to pass
+a minute before. She appeared to take up rather
+more seriously than she need the joke about her
+freedom to deceive. Yet she did this too in a
+beautiful way. "Men are too stupid&mdash;even you.
+You didn't understand just now why, if I post my
+letters myself, it won't be for any thing so vulgar
+as to hide them."
+</p><p>
+"Oh, you said&mdash;for the pleasure."
+</p><p>
+"Yes; but you didn't, you don't understand
+what the pleasure may be. There are refinements&mdash;&mdash;!"
+she more patiently dropped. "I
+mean of consciousness, of sensation, of appreciation,"
+she went on. "No," she sadly insisted&mdash;<i>"men</i>
+don't know. They know, in such matters,
+almost nothing but what women show them."
+</p><p>
+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!"
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">BOOK THIRD</h2>
+<br>
+<h2 align="center">V</h2>
+<br>
+<p>
+The two ladies who, in advance of the Swiss
+season, had been warned that their design
+was unconsidered, that the passes would not be
+clear, nor the air mild, nor the inns open&mdash;the two
+ladies who, characteristically, had braved a good
+deal of possibly interested remonstrance were finding
+themselves, as their adventure turned out, wonderfully
+sustained. It was the judgment of the
+head-waiters and other functionaries on the Italian
+lakes that approved itself now as interested; they
+themselves had been conscious of impatiences, of
+bolder dreams&mdash;at least the younger had; so that
+one of the things they made out together&mdash;making
+out as they did an endless variety&mdash;was that in
+those operatic palaces of the Villa d'Este, of Cadenabbia,
+of Pallanza and Stresa, lone women, however
+reinforced by a travelling-library of instructive
+volumes, were apt to be beguiled and undone.
+Their flights of fancy moreover had been modest;
+they had for instance risked nothing vital in hoping
+to make their way by the Brünig. They were
+making it in fact happily enough as we meet them,
+and were only wishing that, for the wondrous
+beauty of the early high-climbing spring, it might
+have been longer and the places to pause and rest
+more numerous.
+</p><p>
+Such at least had been the intimated attitude of
+Mrs. Stringham, the elder of the companions, who
+had her own view of the impatiences of the
+younger, to which, however, she offered an opposition
+but of the most circuitous. She moved, the
+admirable Mrs. Stringham, in a fine cloud of observation
+and suspicion; she was in the position,
+as she believed, of knowing much more about Milly
+Theale than Milly herself knew, and yet of having
+to darken her knowledge as well as make it active.
+The woman in the world least formed by nature, as
+she was quite aware, for duplicities and labyrinths,
+she found herself dedicated to personal subtlety by
+a new set of circumstances, above all by a new personal
+relation; had now in fact to recognise that an
+education in the occult&mdash;she could scarce say what
+to call it&mdash;had begun for her the day she left New
+York with Mildred. She had come on from Boston
+for that purpose; had seen little of the girl&mdash;or
+rather had seen her but briefly, for Mrs. Stringham,
+when she saw anything at all, saw much, saw
+everything&mdash;before accepting her proposal; and
+had accordingly placed herself, by her act, in a boat
+that she more and more estimated as, humanly
+speaking, of the biggest, though likewise, no
+doubt, in many ways, by reason of its size, of the
+safest. In Boston, the winter before, the young
+lady in whom we are interested had, on the spot,
+deeply, yet almost tacitly, appealed to her, dropped
+into her mind the shy conceit of some assistance,
+some devotion to render. Mrs. Stringham's little
+life had often been visited by shy conceits&mdash;secret
+dreams that had fluttered their hour between its
+narrow walls without, for any great part, so much
+as mustering courage to look out of its rather dim
+windows. But this imagination&mdash;the fancy of a
+possible link with the remarkable young thing from
+New York&mdash;<i>had</i> mustered courage: had perched,
+on the instant, at the clearest look-out it could find,
+and might be said to have remained there till, only
+a few months later, it had caught, in surprise and
+joy, the unmistakable flash of a signal.
+</p><p>
+Milly Theale had Boston friends, such as they
+were, and of recent making; and it was understood
+that her visit to them&mdash;a visit that was not to be
+meagre&mdash;had been undertaken, after a series of
+bereavements, in the interest of the particular peace
+that New York could not give. It was recognised,
+liberally enough, that there were many things&mdash;perhaps
+even too many&mdash;New York <i>could</i> give;
+but this was felt to make no difference in the constant
+fact that what you had most to do, under the
+discipline of life, or of death, was really to feel your
+situation as grave. Boston could help you to
+that as nothing else could, and it had extended
+to Milly, by every presumption, some such measure
+of assistance. Mrs. Stringham was never to forget&mdash;for
+the moment had not faded, nor the infinitely
+fine vibration it set up in any degree ceased&mdash;her
+own first sight of the striking apparition, then unheralded
+and unexplained: the slim, constantly
+pale, delicately haggard, anomalously, agreeably
+angular young person, of not more than two-and-twenty
+in spite of her marks, whose hair was some
+how exceptionally red even for the real thing,
+which it innocently confessed to being, and whose
+clothes were remarkably black even for robes of
+mourning, which was the meaning they expressed.
+It was New York mourning, it was New York hair,
+it was a New York history, confused as yet, but
+multitudinous, of the loss of parents, brothers, sisters,
+almost every human appendage, all on a scale
+and with a sweep that had required the greater stage;
+it was a New York legend of affecting, of romantic
+isolation, and, beyond everything, it was by most accounts,
+in respect to the mass of money so piled on
+the girl's back, a set of New York possibilities. She
+was alone, she was stricken, she was rich, and, in
+particular, she was strange&mdash;a combination in itself
+of a nature to engage Mrs. Stringham's attention.
+But it was the strangeness that most determined
+our good lady's sympathy, convinced as she was
+that it was much greater than any one else&mdash;any
+one but the sole Susan Stringham&mdash;supposed.
+Susan privately settled it that Boston was not in
+the least seeing her, was only occupied with her
+seeing Boston, and that any assumed affinity between
+the two characters was delusive and vain.
+She was seeing her, and she had quite the deepest
+moment of her life in now obeying the instinct to
+conceal the vision. She couldn't explain it&mdash;no one
+would understand. They would say clever Boston
+things&mdash;Mrs. Stringham was from Burlington, Vermont,
+which she boldly upheld as the real heart of
+New England, Boston being "too far south"&mdash;but
+they would only darken counsel.
+</p><p>
+There could be no better proof, than this quick
+intellectual split, of the impression made on our
+friend, who shone, herself, she was well aware, with
+but the reflected light of the admirable city. She
+too had had her discipline, but it had not made
+her striking; it had been prosaically usual, though
+doubtless a decent dose; and had only made her
+usual to match it&mdash;usual, that is, as Boston went.
+She had lost first her husband, and then her mother,
+with whom, on her husband's death, she had lived
+again; so that now, childless, she was but more
+sharply single than before. But she sat rather
+coldly light, having, as she called it, enough to live
+on&mdash;so far, that is, as she lived by bread alone:
+how little indeed she was regularly content with that
+diet appeared from the name she had made&mdash;Susan
+Shepherd Stringham&mdash;as a contributor to the best
+magazines. She wrote short stories, and she fondly
+believed she had her "note," the art of showing
+New England without showing it wholly in the
+kitchen. She had not herself been brought up in
+the kitchen; she knew others who had not; and to
+speak for them had thus become with her a literary
+mission. To <i>be</i> in truth literary had ever been her
+dearest thought, the thought that kept her bright
+little nippers perpetually in position. There were
+masters, models, celebrities, mainly foreign, whom
+she finely accounted so and in whose light she ingeniously
+laboured; there were others whom, however
+chattered about, she ranked with the inane, for
+she was full of discrimination; but all categories
+failed her&mdash;they ceased at least to signify&mdash;as soon
+as she found herself in presence of the real thing,
+the romantic life itself. That was what she saw in
+Mildred&mdash;what positively made her hand a while
+tremble too much for the pen. She had had, it
+seemed to her, a revelation&mdash;such as even New
+England refined and grammatical couldn't give;
+and, all made up as she was of small neat memories
+and ingenuities, little industries and ambitions,
+mixed with something moral, personal, that was still
+more intensely responsive, she felt her new friend
+would have done her an ill turn if their friendship
+shouldn't develop, and yet that nothing would be
+left of anything else if it should. It was for the surrender
+of everything else that she was, however,
+quite prepared, and while she went about her usual
+Boston business with her usual Boston probity she
+was really all the while holding herself. She wore
+her "handsome" felt hat, so Tyrolese, yet some
+how, though feathered from the eagle's wing, so
+truly domestic, with the same straightness and security;
+she attached her fur boa with the same
+honest precautions; she preserved her balance on
+the ice-slopes with the same practised skill; she
+opened, each evening, her "Transcript" with the
+same interfusion of suspense and resignation; she
+attended her almost daily concert with the same
+expenditure of patience and the same economy of
+passion; she flitted in and out of the Public Library
+with the air of conscientiously returning or bravely
+carrying off in her pocket the key of knowledge itself;
+and finally&mdash;it was what she most did&mdash;she
+watched the thin trickle of a fictive "love-interest"
+through that somewhat serpentine channel, in the
+magazines, which she mainly managed to keep clear
+for it. But the real thing, all the while, was elsewhere;
+the real thing had gone back to New York,
+leaving behind it the two unsolved questions, quite
+distinct, of why it <i>was</i> real, and whether she should
+ever be so near it again.
+</p><p>
+For the figure to which these questions attached
+themselves she had found a convenient description&mdash;she
+thought of it for herself, always, as that of a
+girl with a background. The great reality was in
+the fact that, very soon, after but two or three
+meetings, the girl with the background, the girl
+with the crown of old gold and the mourning that
+was not as the mourning of Boston, but at once
+more rebellious in its gloom and more frivolous in
+its frills, had told her she had never seen any one
+like her. They had met thus as opposed curiosities,
+and that simple remark of Milly's&mdash;if simple it was&mdash;became
+the most important thing that had ever
+happened to her; it deprived the love-interest, for
+the time, of actuality and even of pertinence; it
+moved her first, in short, in a high degree, to gratitude,
+and then to no small compassion. Yet in respect
+to this relation at least it was what did prove
+the key of knowledge; it lighted up as nothing else
+could do the poor young woman's history. That
+the potential heiress of all the ages should never
+have seen any one like a mere typical subscriber,
+after all, to the "Transcript" was a truth that&mdash;in
+especial as announced with modesty, with humility,
+with regret&mdash;described a situation. It laid upon
+the elder woman, as to the void to be filled, a
+weight of responsibility; but in particular it led her
+to ask whom poor Mildred <i>had</i> then seen, and what
+range of contacts it had taken to produce such
+queer surprises. That was really the inquiry that
+had ended by clearing the air: the key of knowledge
+was felt to click in the lock from the moment
+it flashed upon Mrs. Stringham that her friend had
+been starved for culture. Culture was what she
+herself represented for her, and it was living up to
+that principle that would surely prove the great
+business. She knew, the clever lady, what the
+principle itself represented, and the limits of her
+own store; and a certain alarm would have grown
+upon her if something else hadn't grown faster.
+</p><p>
+This was, fortunately for her&mdash;and we give it in her
+own words&mdash;the sense of a harrowing pathos.
+That, primarily, was what appealed to her, what
+seemed to open the door of romance for her still
+wider than any, than a still more reckless, connection
+with the "picture-papers." For such was
+essentially the point: it was rich, romantic, abysmal,
+to have, as was evident, thousands and thousands a
+year, to have youth and intelligence and if not
+beauty, at least, in equal measure, a high, dim,
+charming, ambiguous oddity, which was even better,
+and then on top of all to enjoy boundless freedom,
+the freedom of the wind in the desert&mdash;it was
+unspeakably touching to be so equipped and yet to
+have been reduced by fortune to little humble-minded
+mistakes.
+</p><p>
+It brought our friend's imagination back again
+to New York, where aberrations were so possible
+in the intellectual sphere, and it in fact caused a
+visit she presently paid there to overflow with interest.
+As Milly had beautifully invited her, so she
+would hold out if she could against the strain of
+so much confidence in her mind; and the remarkable
+thing was that even at the end of three weeks
+she <i>had</i> held out. But by this time her mind had
+grown comparatively bold and free; it was dealing
+with new quantities, a different proportion altogether&mdash;and
+that had made for refreshment: she
+had accordingly gone home in convenient possession
+of her subject. New York was vast, New York
+was startling, with strange histories, with wild cosmopolite
+backward generations that accounted for
+anything; and to have got nearer the luxuriant
+tribe of which the rare creature was the final flower,
+the immense, extravagant, unregulated cluster, with
+free-living ancestors, handsome dead cousins, lurid
+uncles, beautiful vanished aunts, persons all busts
+and curls, preserved, though so exposed, in the
+marble of famous French chisels&mdash;all this, to say
+nothing of the effect of closer growths of the stem,
+was to have had one's small world-space both
+crowded and enlarged. Our couple had at all
+events effected an exchange; the elder friend had
+been as consciously intellectual as possible, and the
+younger, abounding in personal revelation, had
+been as unconsciously distinguished. This was
+poetry&mdash;it was also history&mdash;Mrs. Stringham
+thought, to a finer tune even than Maeterlink and
+Pater, than Marbot and Gregorovius. She appointed
+occasions for the reading of these authors
+with her hostess, rather perhaps than actually
+achieved great spans; but what they managed and
+what they missed speedily sank for her into the dim
+depths of the merely relative, so quickly, so strongly
+had she clutched her central clue. All her scruples
+and hesitations, all her anxious enthusiasms, had reduced
+themselves to a single alarm&mdash;the fear that
+she really might act on her companion clumsily and
+coarsely. She was positively afraid of what she
+might do to her, and to avoid that, to avoid it with
+piety and passion, to do, rather, nothing at all, to
+leave her untouched because no touch one could
+apply, however light, however just, however earnest
+and anxious, would be half good enough, would be
+anything but an ugly smutch upon perfection&mdash;this
+now imposed itself as a consistent, an inspiring
+thought.
+</p><p>
+Less than a month after the event that had so
+determined Mrs. Stringham's attitude&mdash;close upon
+the heels, that is, of her return from New York&mdash;she
+was reached by a proposal that brought up for
+her the kind of question her delicacy might have
+to contend with. Would she start for Europe with
+her young friend at the earliest possible date, and
+should she be willing to do so without making conditions?
+The inquiry was launched by wire; explanations,
+in sufficiency, were promised; extreme
+urgency was suggested, and a general surrender
+invited. It was to the honour of her sincerity that
+she made the surrender on the spot, though it was
+not perhaps altogether to that of her logic. She
+had wanted, very consciously, from the first, to give
+something up for her new acquaintance, but she
+had now no doubt that she was practically giving
+up all. What settled this was the fulness of a particular
+impression, the impression that had throughout
+more and more supported her and which she
+would have uttered so far as she might by saying
+that the charm of the creature was positively in the
+creature's greatness. She would have been content
+so to leave it; unless indeed she had said, more
+familiarly, that Mildred was the biggest impression
+of her life. That was at all events the biggest account
+of her, and none but a big, clearly, would do.
+Her situation, as such things were called, was on
+the grand scale; but it still was not that. It was
+her nature, once for all&mdash;a nature that reminded
+Mrs. Stringham of the term always used in the newspapers
+about the great new steamers, the inordinate
+number of "feet of water" they drew; so
+that if, in your little boat, you had chosen to hover
+and approach, you had but yourself to thank, when
+once motion was started, for the way the draught
+pulled you. Milly drew the feet of water, and odd
+though it might seem that a lonely girl, who was
+not robust and who hated sound and show, should
+stir the stream like a leviathan, her companion
+floated off with the sense of rocking violently at
+her side. More than prepared, however, for that
+excitement, Mrs. Stringham mainly failed of ease
+in respect to her own consistency. To attach herself
+for an indefinite time seemed a roundabout
+way of holding her hands off. If she wished to be
+sure of neither touching nor smutching, the
+straighter plan would doubtless have been not to
+keep her friend within reach. This in fact she fully
+recognised, and with it the degree to which she
+desired that the girl should lead her life, a life certain
+to be so much finer than that of anybody else.
+The difficulty, however, by good fortune, cleared
+away as soon as she had further recognised, as she
+was speedily able to do, that she, Susan Shepherd&mdash;the
+name with which Milly for the most part
+amused herself&mdash;was <i>not</i> anybody else. She had
+renounced that character; she had now no life to
+lead; and she honestly believed that she was thus
+supremely equipped for leading Milly's own. No
+other person whatever, she was sure, had to an
+equal degree this qualification, and it was really to
+assert it that she fondly embarked.
+</p><p>
+Many things, though not in many weeks, had
+come and gone since then, and one of the best of
+them, doubtless, had been the voyage itself, by
+the happy southern course, to the succession of
+Mediterranean ports, with the dazzled wind-up at
+Naples. Two or three others had preceded this;
+incidents, indeed rather lively marks, of their last
+fortnight at home, and one of which had determined
+on Mrs. Stringham's part a rush to New York, forty-eight
+breathless hours there, previous to her final
+rally. But the great sustained sea-light had drunk
+up the rest of the picture, so that for many days
+other questions and other possibilities sounded with
+as little effect as a trio of penny whistles might
+sound in a Wagner overture. It was the Wagner
+overture that practically prevailed, up through Italy,
+where Milly had already been, still further up and
+across the Alps, which were also partly known to
+Mrs. Stringham; only perhaps "taken" to a time
+not wholly congruous, hurried in fact on account
+of the girl's high restlessness. She had been expected,
+she had frankly promised, to be restless&mdash;that
+was partly why she was "great"&mdash;or was a
+consequence, at any rate, if not a cause; yet she
+had not perhaps altogether announced herself as
+straining so hard at the cord. It was familiar, it
+was beautiful to Mrs. Stringham that she had arrears
+to make up, the chances that had lapsed for
+her through the wanton ways of forefathers fond of
+Paris, but not of its higher sides, and fond almost
+of nothing else; but the vagueness, the openness,
+the eagerness without point and the interest without
+pause&mdash;all a part of the charm of her oddity as
+at first presented&mdash;had become more striking in
+proportion as they triumphed over movement and
+change. She had arts and idiosyncrasies of which
+no great account could have been given, but which
+were a daily grace if you lived with them; such as
+the art of being almost tragically impatient and yet
+making it as light as air; of being inexplicably sad
+and yet making it as clear as noon; of being unmistakably
+gay, and yet making it as soft as dusk.
+Mrs. Stringham by this time understood everything,
+was more than ever confirmed in wonder and
+admiration, in her view that it was life enough simply
+to feel her companion's feelings; but there were
+special keys she had not yet added to her bunch,
+impressions that, of a sudden, were apt to affect her
+as new.
+</p><p>
+This particular day on the great Swiss road had
+been, for some reason, full of them, and they referred
+themselves, provisionally, to some deeper
+depth than she had touched&mdash;though into two or
+three such depths, it must be added, she had peeped
+long enough to find herself suddenly draw back. It
+was not Milly's unpacified state, in short, that now
+troubled her&mdash;though certainly, as Europe was the
+great American sedative, the failure was to some
+extent to be noted: it was the suspected presence
+of something behind it&mdash;which, however, could
+scarcely have taken its place there since their departure.
+What any fresh motive of unrest could
+suddenly have sprung from was, in short, not to be
+divined. It was but half an explanation to say that
+excitement, for each of them, had naturally dropped,
+and that what they had left behind, or tried to&mdash;the
+great serious facts of life, as Mrs. Stringham liked
+to call them&mdash;was once more coming into sight
+as objects loom through smoke when smoke begins
+to clear; for these were general appearances from
+which the girl's own aspect, her really larger vagueness,
+seemed rather to disconnect itself. The nearest
+approach to a personal anxiety indulged in as
+yet by the elder lady was on her taking occasion to
+wonder if what she had more than anything else
+got hold of mightn't be one of the finer, one of the
+finest, one of the rarest&mdash;as she called it so that she
+might call it nothing worse&mdash;cases of American
+intensity. She had just had a moment of alarm&mdash;asked
+herself if her young friend were merely going
+to treat her to some complicated drama of nerves. At
+the end of a week, however, with their further progress,
+her young friend had effectively answered the
+question and given her the impression, indistinct indeed
+as yet, of something that had a reality compared
+with which the nervous explanation would have
+been coarse. Mrs. Stringham found herself from
+that hour, in other words, in presence of an explanation
+that remained a muffled and intangible
+form, but that, assuredly, should it take on sharpness,
+would explain everything and more than
+everything, would become instantly the light in
+which Milly was to be read.
+</p><p>
+Such a matter as this may at all events speak of
+the style in which our young woman could affect
+those who were near her, may testify to the sort of
+interest she could inspire. She worked&mdash;and seemingly
+quite without design&mdash;upon the sympathy,
+the curiosity, the fancy of her associates, and we
+shall really ourselves scarce otherwise come closer
+to her than by feeling their impression and sharing,
+if need be, their confusion. She reduced them, Mrs.
+Stringham would have said, reduced them to a consenting
+bewilderment; which was precisely, for that
+good lady, on a last analysis, what was most in
+harmony with her greatness. She exceeded, escaped
+measure, was surprising only because <i>they</i>
+were so far from great. Thus it was that on this
+wondrous day on the Brünig the spell of watching
+her had grown more than ever irresistible; a proof
+of what&mdash;or of a part of what&mdash;Mrs. Stringham had,
+with all the rest, been reduced to. She had almost
+the sense of tracking her young friend as if at a
+given moment to pounce. She knew she shouldn't
+pounce, she hadn't come out to pounce; yet she
+felt her attention secretive, all the same, and her
+observation scientific. She struck herself as hovering
+like a spy, applying tests, laying traps, concealing
+signs. This would last, however, only till she
+should fairly know what was the matter; and to
+watch was, after all, meanwhile, a way of clinging
+to the girl, not less than an occupation, a satisfaction
+in itself. The pleasure of watching, moreover,
+if a reason were needed, came from a sense
+of her beauty. Her beauty hadn't at all originally
+seemed a part of the situation, and Mrs. Stringham
+had, even in the first flush of friendship, not named
+it, grossly, to any one; having seen early that, for
+stupid people&mdash;and who, she sometimes secretly
+asked herself, wasn't stupid?&mdash;it would take a great
+deal of explaining. She had learned not to mention
+it till it was mentioned first&mdash;which occasionally
+happened, but not too often; and then she was
+there in force. Then she both warmed to the perception
+that met her own perception, and disputed
+it, suspiciously, as to special items; while, in general,
+she had learned to refine even to the point of
+herself employing the word that most people employed.
+She employed it to pretend that she was
+also stupid and so have done with the matter; spoke
+of her friend as plain, as ugly even, in a case of
+especially dense insistence; but as, in appearance,
+so "awfully full of things." 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&mdash;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.
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham was now on the ground of
+thrilled recognitions, small sharp echoes of a past
+which she kept in a well-thumbed case, but which,
+on pressure of a spring and exposure to the air,
+still showed itself ticking as hard as an honest old
+watch. The embalmed "Europe" of her younger
+time had partly stood for three years of Switzerland,
+a term of continuous school at Vevey, with rewards
+of merit in the form of silver medals tied by blue
+ribbons and mild mountain-passes attacked with
+alpenstocks. It was the good girls who, in the holidays,
+were taken highest, and our friend could now
+judge, from what she supposed her familiarity with
+the minor peaks, that she had been one of the best.
+These reminiscences, sacred to-day because prepared
+in the hushed chambers of the past, had been
+part of the general train laid for the pair of sisters,
+daughters early fatherless, by their brave Vermont
+mother, who struck her at present as having apparently,
+almost like Columbus, worked out, all unassisted,
+a conception of the other side of the globe.
+She had focussed Vevey, by the light of nature, and
+with extraordinary completeness, at Burlington;
+after which she had embarked, sailed, landed, explored
+and, above all, made good her presence.
+She had given her daughters the five years in
+Switzerland and Germany that were to leave them
+ever afterwards a standard of comparison for all
+cycles of Cathay, and to stamp the younger in especial&mdash;Susan
+was the younger&mdash;with a character
+that, as Mrs. Stringham had often had occasion,
+through life, to say to herself, made all the difference.
+It made all the difference for Mrs. Stringham,
+over and over again and in the most remote
+connections, that, thanks to her parent's lonely,
+thrifty, hardy faith, she was a woman of the world.
+There were plenty of women who were all sorts of
+things that she wasn't, but who, on the other hand,
+were not that, and who didn't know <i>she</i> was (which
+she liked&mdash;it relegated them still further) and didn't
+know, either, how it enabled her to judge them.
+She had never seen herself so much in this light as
+during the actual phase of her associated, if slightly
+undirected, pilgrimage; and the consciousness gave
+perhaps to her plea for a pause more intensity than
+she knew. The irrecoverable days had come back
+to her from far off; they were part of the sense of
+the cool upper air and of everything else that hung
+like an indestructible scent to the torn garment of
+youth&mdash;the taste of honey and the luxury of milk,
+the sound of cattle-bells and the rush of streams, the
+fragrance of trodden balms and the dizziness of deep
+gorges.
+</p><p>
+Milly clearly felt these things too, but they affected
+her companion at moments&mdash;that was quite
+the way Mrs. Stringham would have expressed it&mdash;as
+the princess in a conventional tragedy might
+have affected the confidant if a personal emotion
+had ever been permitted to the latter. That a princess
+could only be a princess was a truth with which,
+essentially, a confidant, however responsive, had to
+live. Mrs. Stringham was a woman of the world,
+but Milly Theale was a princess, the only one she
+had yet had to deal with, and this in its way, too,
+made all the difference. It was a perfectly definite
+doom for the wearer&mdash;it was for every one else
+a perfectly palpable quality. It might have been,
+possibly, with its involved loneliness and other mysteries,
+the weight under which she fancied her companion's
+admirable head occasionally, and ever so
+submissively, bowed. Milly had quite assented at
+luncheon to their staying over, and had left her to
+look at rooms, settle questions, arrange about their
+keeping on their carriage and horses; cares that
+had now moreover fallen to Mrs. Stringham as a
+matter of course and that yet for some reason, on
+this occasion particularly, brought home to her&mdash;all
+agreeably, richly, almost grandly&mdash;what it was to
+live with the great. Her young friend had, in a
+sublime degree, a sense closed to the general question
+of difficulty, which she got rid of, furthermore,
+not in the least as one had seen many charming
+persons do, by merely passing it on to others. She
+kept it completely at a distance: it never entered
+the circle; the most plaintive confidant couldn't
+have dragged it in; and to tread the path of a confidant
+was accordingly to live exempt. Service was
+in other words so easy to render that the whole
+thing was like court life without the hardships. It
+came back of course to the question of money, and
+our observant lady had by this time repeatedly reflected
+that if one were talking of the "difference,"
+it was just this, this incomparably and nothing else,
+that when all was said and done most made it. A
+less vulgarly, a less obviously purchasing or parading
+person she couldn't have imagined; but it was,
+all the same, the truth of truths that the girl couldn't
+get away from her wealth. She might leave her
+conscientious companion as freely alone with it as
+possible and never ask a question, scarce even tolerate
+a reference; but it was in the fine folds of the
+helplessly expensive little black frock that she drew
+over the grass as she now strolled vaguely off; it
+was in the curious and splendid coils of hair,
+"done" with no eye whatever to the <i>mode du jour,</i>
+that peeped from under the corresponding indifference
+of her hat, the merely personal tradition that
+suggested a sort of noble inelegance; it lurked between
+the leaves of the uncut but antiquated Tauchnitz
+volume of which, before going out, she had
+mechanically possessed herself. 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&mdash;that was what it was to be really rich. It
+had to be <i>the</i> thing you were. When at the end of
+an hour she had not returned to the house Mrs.
+Stringham, though the bright afternoon was yet
+young, took, with precautions, the same direction,
+went to join her in case of her caring for a walk.
+But the purpose of joining her was in truth less distinct
+than that of a due regard for a possibly preferred
+detachment: so that, once more, the good
+lady proceeded with a quietness that made her
+slightly "underhand" even in her own eyes. She
+couldn't help that, however, and she didn't care,
+sure as she was that what she really wanted was not
+to overstep, but to stop in time. It was to be able
+to stop in time that she went softly, but she had
+on this occasion further to go than ever yet, for
+she followed in vain, and at last with some anxiety,
+the footpath she believed Milly to have taken. It
+wound up a hillside and into the higher Alpine
+meadows in which, all these last days, they had so
+often wanted, as they passed above or below, to
+stray; and then it obscured itself in a wood, but
+always going up, up, and with a small cluster of
+brown old high-perched chalets evidently for its
+goal. Mrs. Stringham reached in due course the
+chalets, and there received from a bewildered old
+woman, a very fearful person to behold, an indication
+that sufficiently guided her. The young lady
+had been seen not long before passing further on,
+over a crest and to a place where the way would
+drop again, as our unappeased inquirer found it, in
+fact, a quarter of an hour later, markedly and almost
+alarmingly to do. It led somewhere, yet apparently
+quite into space, for the great side of the mountain
+appeared, from where she pulled up, to fall away
+altogether, though probably but to some issue below
+and out of sight. Her uncertainty moreover
+was brief, for she next became aware of the presence
+on a fragment of rock, twenty yards off, of the
+Tauchnitz volume that the girl had brought out,
+and that therefore pointed to her shortly previous
+passage. She had rid herself of the book, which
+was an encumbrance, and meant of course to pick
+it up on her return; but as she hadn't yet picked it
+up what on earth had become of her? Mrs. Stringham,
+I hasten to add, was within a few moments to
+see; but it was quite an accident that she had not,
+before they were over, betrayed by her deeper agitation
+the fact of her own nearness.
+</p><p>
+The whole place, with the descent of the path
+and as a sequel to a sharp turn that was masked by
+rocks and shrubs, appeared to fall precipitously and
+to become a "view" pure and simple, a view of
+great extent and beauty, but thrown forward and
+vertiginous. Milly, with the promise of it from just
+above, had gone straight down to it, not stopping
+till it was all before her; and here, on what struck
+her friend as the dizzy edge of it, she was seated
+at her ease. The path somehow took care of itself
+and its final business, but the girl's seat was a slab
+of rock at the end of a short promontory or excrescence
+that merely pointed off to the right into
+gulfs of air and that was so placed by good fortune,
+if not by the worst, as to be at last completely
+visible. For Mrs. Stringham stifled a cry on taking
+in what she believed to be the danger of such a
+perch for a mere maiden; her liability to slip, to
+slide, to leap, to be precipitated by a single false
+movement, by a turn of the head&mdash;how could one
+tell? into whatever was beneath. A thousand
+thoughts, for the minute, roared in the poor lady's
+ears, but without reaching, as happened, Milly's. It
+was a commotion that left our observer intensely
+still and holding her breath. What had first been
+offered her was the possibility of a latent intention&mdash;however
+wild the idea&mdash;in such a posture; of
+some betrayed accordance of Milly's caprice with
+a horrible hidden obsession. But since Mrs. Stringham
+stood as motionless as if a sound, a syllable,
+must have produced the start that would be fatal,
+so even the lapse of a few seconds had a partly
+reassuring effect. It gave her time to receive the
+impression which, when she some minutes later
+softly retraced her steps, was to be the sharpest she
+carried away. This was the impression that if the
+girl was deeply and recklessly meditating there, she
+was not meditating a jump; she was on the contrary,
+as she sat, much more in a state of uplifted
+and unlimited possession that had nothing to gain
+from violence. She was looking down on the kingdoms
+of the earth, and though indeed that of itself
+might well go to the brain, it wouldn't be with a
+view of renouncing them. Was she choosing
+among them, or did she want them all? This question,
+before Mrs. Stringham had decided what to
+do, made others vain; in accordance with which she
+saw, or believed she did, that if it might be dangerous
+to call out, to sound in any way a surprise, it
+would probably be safe enough to withdraw as she
+had come. She watched a while longer, she held
+her breath, and she never knew afterwards what
+time had elapsed.
+</p><p>
+Not many minutes probably, yet they had not
+seemed few, and they had given her so much to
+think of, not only while creeping home, but while
+waiting afterwards at the inn, that she was still busy
+with them when, late in the afternoon, Milly reappeared.
+She had stopped at the point of the path
+where the Tauchnitz lay, had taken it up and, with
+the pencil attached to her watch-guard, had scrawled
+a word&mdash;<i>à bientôt!</i>&mdash;across the cover; then, even
+under the girl's continued delay, had measured time
+without a return of alarm. For she now saw that
+the great thing she had brought away was precisely
+a conviction that the future was not to exist for
+her princess in the form of any sharp or simple release
+from the human predicament. It wouldn't
+be for her a question of a flying leap and thereby
+of a quick escape. It would be a question of taking
+full in the face the whole assault of life, to the
+general muster of which indeed her face might
+have been directly presented as she sat there on
+her rock. Mrs. Stringham was thus able to say
+to herself, even after another interval of some
+length, that if her young friend still continued absent
+it wouldn't be because&mdash;whatever the opportunity&mdash;she
+had cut short the thread. She
+wouldn't have committed suicide; she knew herself
+unmistakably reserved for some more complicated
+passage; this was the very vision in which
+she had, with no little awe, been discovered. The
+image that thus remained with the elder lady kept
+the character of revelation. During the breathless
+minutes of her watch she had seen her companion
+afresh; the latter's type, aspect, marks, her history,
+her state, her beauty, her mystery, all unconsciously
+betrayed themselves to the Alpine air, and all had
+been gathered in again to feed Mrs. Stringham's
+flame. They are things that will more distinctly
+appear for us, and they are meanwhile briefly represented
+by the enthusiasm that was stronger on
+our friend's part than any doubt. It was a consciousness
+she was scarce yet used to carrying, but
+she had as beneath her feet a mine of something
+precious. She seemed to herself to stand near the
+mouth, not yet quite cleared. The mine but needed
+working and would certainly yield a treasure. She
+was not thinking, either, of Milly's gold.
+</p>
+<br>
+<h2 align="center">VI</h2>
+<br>
+<p>
+The girl said nothing, when they met, about the
+words scrawled on the Tauchnitz, and Mrs. Stringham
+then noticed that she had not the book with
+her. She had left it lying and probably would
+never remember it at all. Her comrade's decision
+was therefore quickly made not to speak of having
+followed her; and within five minutes of her return,
+wonderfully enough, the preoccupation denoted by
+her forgetfulness further declared itself. "Should
+you think me quite abominable if I were to say that
+after all&mdash;&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham had already thought, with the
+first sound of the question, everything she was capable
+of thinking, and had immediately made such a
+sign that Milly's words gave place to visible relief
+at her assent. "You don't care for our stop here&mdash;you'd
+rather go straight on? We'll start then
+with the peep of to-morrow's dawn&mdash;or as early as
+you like; it's only rather late now to take the road
+again." And she smiled to show how she meant it
+for a joke that an instant onward rush was what the
+girl would have wished. "I bullied you into stopping,"
+she added; "so it serves me right."
+</p><p>
+Milly made in general the most of her good
+friend's jokes; but she humoured this one a little
+absently. "Oh yes, you do bully me." And it
+was thus arranged between them, with no discussion
+at all, that they would resume their journey in
+the morning. The younger tourist's interest in the
+detail of the matter&mdash;in spite of a declaration from
+the elder that she would consent to be dragged anywhere&mdash;appeared
+almost immediately afterwards
+quite to lose itself; she promised, however, to think
+till supper of where, with the world all before them,
+they might go&mdash;supper having been ordered for
+such time as permitted of lighted candles. It had
+been agreed between them that lighted candles at
+wayside inns, in strange countries, amid mountain
+scenery, gave the evening meal a peculiar poetry&mdash;such
+being the mild adventures, the refinements of
+impression, that they, as they would have said, went
+in for. It was now as if, before this repast, Milly
+had designed to "lie down"; but at the end of
+three minutes more she was not lying down, she
+was saying instead, abruptly, with a transition that
+was like a jump of four thousand miles: "What
+was it that, in New York, on the ninth, when you
+saw him alone, Dr. Finch said to you?"
+</p><p>
+It was not till later that Mrs. Stringham fully
+knew why the question had startled her still more
+than its suddenness explained; though the effect of
+it even at the moment was almost to frighten her
+into a false answer. She had to think, to remember
+the occasion, the "ninth," in New York, the time
+she had seen Dr. Finch alone, and to recall what
+he had then said to her; and when everything had
+come back it was quite, at first, for a moment, as
+if he had said something that immensely mattered.
+He hadn't, however, in fact; it was only as if he
+might perhaps after all have been going to. It
+was on the sixth&mdash;within ten days of their sailing&mdash;that
+she had hurried from Boston under the
+alarm, a small but a sufficient shock, of hearing that
+Mildred had suddenly been taken ill, had had, from
+some obscure cause, such an upset as threatened to
+stay their journey. The bearing of the accident
+had happily soon announced itself as slight, and
+there had been, in the event, but a few hours of anxiety;
+the journey had been pronounced again not
+only possible, but, as representing "change," highly
+advisable; and if the zealous guest had had five
+minutes by herself with the doctor, that was, clearly,
+no more at his instance than at her own. Almost
+nothing had passed between them but an easy exchange
+of enthusiasms in respect to the remedial
+properties of "Europe"; and this assurance, as the
+facts came back to her, she was now able to give.
+"Nothing whatever, on my word of honour, that
+you mayn't know or mightn't then have known.
+I've no secret with him about you. What makes
+you suspect it? I don't quite make out how you
+know I did see him alone."
+</p><p>
+"No&mdash;you never told me," said Milly. "And I
+don't mean," she went on, "during the twenty-four
+hours while I was bad, when your putting your
+heads together was natural enough. I mean after I
+was better&mdash;the last thing before you went home."
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham continued to wonder. "Who
+told you I saw him then?"
+</p><p>
+<i>"He</i> didn't himself&mdash;nor did you write me it
+afterwards. We speak of it now for the first time.
+That's exactly why!" Milly declared&mdash;with something
+in her face and voice that, the next moment,
+betrayed for her companion that she had really
+known nothing, had only conjectured and, chancing
+her charge, made a hit. Yet why had her mind
+been busy with the question? "But if you're not,
+as you now assure me, in his confidence," she
+smiled, "it's no matter."
+</p><p>
+"I'm not in his confidence, and he had nothing
+to confide. But are you feeling unwell?"
+</p><p>
+The elder woman was earnest for the truth,
+though the possibility she named was not at all the
+one that seemed to fit&mdash;witness the long climb
+Milly had just indulged in. The girl showed her
+constant white face, but that her friends had all
+learned to discount, and it was often brightest when
+superficially not bravest. She continued for a little
+mysteriously to smile. "I don't know&mdash;haven't
+really the least idea. But it might be well to find
+out."
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham, at this, flared into sympathy.
+"Are you in trouble&mdash;in pain?"
+</p><p>
+"Not the least little bit. But I sometimes wonder&mdash;&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"Yes"&mdash;she pressed: "wonder what?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, if I shall have much of it."
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham stared. "Much of what? Not
+of pain?"
+</p><p>
+"Of everything. Of everything I have."
+</p><p>
+Anxiously again, tenderly, our friend cast about.
+"You 'have' everything; so that when you say
+'much' of it&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"I only mean," the girl broke in, "shall I have
+it for long? That is if I <i>have</i> got it."
+</p><p>
+She had at present the effect, a little, of confounding,
+or at least of perplexing her comrade, who was
+touched, who was always touched, by something
+helpless in her grace and abrupt in her turns, and
+yet actually half made out in her a sort of mocking
+light. "If you've got an ailment?"
+</p><p>
+"If I've got everything," Milly laughed.
+</p><p>
+"Ah, <i>that</i>&mdash;like almost nobody else."
+</p><p>
+"Then for how long?"
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham's eyes entreated her; she had
+gone close to her, half enclosed her with urgent
+arms. "Do you want to see some one?" And
+then as the girl only met it with a slow headshake,
+though looking perhaps a shade more conscious:
+"We'll go straight to the best near doctor." This
+too, however, produced but a gaze of qualified assent
+and a silence, sweet and vague, that left everything
+open. Our friend decidedly lost herself.
+"Tell me, for God's sake, if you're in distress."
+</p><p>
+"I don't think I've really <i>everything,"</i> Milly said
+as if to explain&mdash;and as if also to put it pleasantly.
+</p><p>
+"But what on earth can I do for you?"
+The girl hesitated, then seemed on the point of
+being able to say; but suddenly changed and expressed
+herself otherwise. "Dear, dear thing&mdash;I'm
+only too happy!"
+</p><p>
+It brought them closer, but it rather confirmed
+Mrs. Stringham's doubt. "Then what's the matter?"
+</p><p>
+"That's the matter&mdash;that I can scarcely bear it."
+</p><p>
+"But what is it you think you haven't got?"
+</p><p>
+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 <i>have!"</i>
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham took it in&mdash;her sense of being
+"put off" with it, the possible, probable irony
+of it&mdash;and her tenderness renewed itself in the positive
+grimness of a long murmur. "Whom will
+you see?"&mdash;for it was as if they looked down from
+their height at a continent of doctors. "Where
+will you first go?"
+</p><p>
+Milly had for the third time her air of consideration;
+but she came back with it to her plea of some
+minutes before. "I'll tell you at supper&mdash;good-bye
+till then." And she left the room with a lightness
+that testified for her companion to something
+that again particularly pleased her in the renewed
+promise of motion. The odd passage just concluded,
+Mrs. Stringham mused as she once more sat
+alone with a hooked needle and a ball of silk, the
+"fine" work with which she was always provided&mdash;this
+mystifying mood had simply been precipitated,
+no doubt, by their prolonged halt, with which
+the girl hadn't really been in sympathy. One had
+only to admit that her complaint was in fact but the
+excess of the joy of life, and everything <i>did</i> then
+fit. She couldn't stop for the joy, but she could
+go on for it, and with the sense of going on she
+floated again, was restored to her great spaces.
+There was no evasion of any truth&mdash;so at least
+Susan Shepherd hoped&mdash;in one's sitting there while
+the twilight deepened and feeling still more finely
+that the position of this young lady was magnificent.
+The evening at that height had naturally
+turned to cold, and the travellers had bespoken a
+fire with their meal; the great Alpine road asserted
+its brave presence through the small panes of the
+low, clean windows, with incidents at the inn-door,
+the yellow <i>diligence,</i> the great waggons, the hurrying,
+hooded, private conveyances, reminders, for
+our fanciful friend, of old stories, old pictures, historic
+flights, escapes, pursuits, things that had happened,
+things indeed that by a sort of strange congruity
+helped her to read the meanings of the
+greatest interest into the relation in which she was
+now so deeply involved. It was natural that this
+record of the magnificence of her companion's position
+should strike her as, after all, the best meaning
+she could extract; for she herself was seated in
+the magnificence as in a court-carriage&mdash;she came
+back to that, and such a method of progression,
+such a view from crimson cushions, would evidently
+have a great deal more to give. By the time the
+candles were lighted for supper and the short, white
+curtains were drawn, Milly had reappeared, and the
+little scenic room had then all its romance. That
+charm moreover was far from broken by the words
+in which she, without further loss of time, satisfied
+her patient mate. "I want to go straight to London."
+</p><p>
+It was unexpected, corresponding with no view
+positively taken at their departure; when England
+had appeared, on the contrary, rather relegated and
+postponed&mdash;seen for the moment, as who should
+say, at the end of an avenue of preparations and introductions.
+London, in short, might have been
+supposed to be the crown, and to be achieved like a
+siege by gradual approaches. Milly's actual fine
+stride was therefore the more exciting, as any simplification
+almost always was to Mrs. Stringham;
+who, besides, was afterwards to recall as the very
+beginning of a drama the terms in which, between
+their smoky candles, the girl had put her preference
+and in which still other things had come up, come
+while the clank of waggon-chains in the sharp air
+reached their ears, with the stamp of hoofs, the rattle
+of buckets and the foreign questions, foreign
+answers, that were all alike a part of the cheery converse
+of the road. The girl brought it out in truth
+as she might have brought a huge confession, something
+she admitted herself shy about and that would
+seem to show her as frivolous; it had rolled over
+her that what she wanted of Europe was "people,"
+so far as they were to be had, and that if her friend
+really wished to know, the vision of this same equivocal
+quantity was what had haunted her during
+their previous days, in museums and churches, and
+what was again spoiling for her the pure taste of
+scenery. She was all for scenery&mdash;yes; but she
+wanted it human and personal, and all she could say
+was that there would be in London&mdash;wouldn't
+there? more of that kind than anywhere else. She
+came back to her idea that if it wasn't for long&mdash;if
+nothing should happen to be so for <i>her</i>&mdash;why, the
+particular thing she spoke of would probably have
+most to give her in the time, would probably be
+less than anything else a waste of her remainder.
+She produced this last consideration indeed with
+such gaiety that Mrs. Stringham was not again disconcerted
+by it, was in fact quite ready&mdash;if talk of
+early dying was in order&mdash;to match it from her own
+future. Good, then; they would, eat and drink because
+of what might happen to-morrow; and they
+would direct their course from that moment with a
+view to such eating and drinking. They ate and
+drank that night, in truth, as if in the spirit of this
+decision; whereby the air, before they separated,
+felt itself the clearer.
+</p><p>
+It had cleared perhaps to a view only too extensive&mdash;extensive,
+that is, in proportion to the signs
+of life presented. The idea of "people" was not
+so entertained on Milly's part as to connect itself
+with particular persons, and the fact remained for
+each of the ladies that they would, completely unknown,
+disembark at Dover amid the completely
+unknowing. They had no relation already formed;
+this plea Mrs. Stringham put forward to see what it
+would produce. It produced nothing at first but
+the observation on the girl's side that what she had
+in mind was no thought of society nor of scraping
+acquaintance; nothing was further from her than
+to desire the opportunities represented for the compatriot
+in general by a trunkful of "letters." It
+wasn't a question, in short, of the people the compatriot
+was after; it was the human, the English
+picture itself, as they might see it in their own way&mdash;the
+world imagined always in what one had read
+and dreamed. Mrs. Stringham did every justice to
+this world, but when later on an occasion chanced
+to present itself, she made a point of not omitting
+to remark that it might be a comfort to know in
+advance even an individual. This still, however,
+failed in vulgar parlance, to "fetch" Milly, so that
+she had presently to go all the way. "Haven't I
+understood from you, for that matter, that you gave
+Mr. Densher something of a promise?"
+</p><p>
+There was a moment, on this, when Milly's look
+had to be taken as representing one of two things&mdash;either
+that she was completely vague about the
+promise or that Mr. Densher's name itself started
+no train. But she really couldn't be so vague about
+the promise, her interlocutress quickly saw, without
+attaching it to something; it had to be a promise
+to somebody in particular to be so repudiated. In
+the event, accordingly, she acknowledged Mr. Merton
+Densher, the so unusually clever young Englishman
+who had made his appearance in New York
+on some special literary business&mdash;wasn't it?&mdash;shortly
+before their departure, and who had been
+three or four times in her house during the
+brief period between her visit to Boston and her
+companion's subsequent stay with her; but she required
+much reminding before it came back to her
+that she had mentioned to this companion just
+afterwards the confidence expressed by the personage
+in question in her never doing so dire a thing
+as to come to London without, as the phrase was,
+looking a fellow up. She had left him the enjoyment
+of his confidence, the form of which might have
+appeared a trifle free&mdash;that she now reasserted; she
+had done nothing either to impair or to enhance it;
+but she had also left Mrs. Stringham, in the connection
+and at the time, rather sorry to have missed Mr.
+Densher. She had thought of him again after that,
+the elder woman; she had likewise gone so far as to
+notice that Milly appeared not to have done so&mdash;which
+the girl might easily have betrayed; and, interested
+as she was in everything that concerned
+her, she had made out for herself, for herself only
+and rather idly, that, but for interruptions, the
+young Englishman might have become a better acquaintance.
+His being an acquaintance at all was
+one of the signs that in the first days had helped to
+place Milly, as a young person with the world before
+her, for sympathy and wonder. Isolated, unmothered,
+unguarded, but with her other strong
+marks, her big house, her big fortune, her big freedom,
+she had lately begun to "receive," for all her
+few years, as an older woman might have done&mdash;as
+was done, precisely, by princesses who had public
+considerations to observe and who came of age
+very early. If it was thus distinct to Mrs. Stringham
+then that Mr. Densher had gone off somewhere
+else in connection with his errand before her
+visit to New York, it had been also not undiscoverable
+that he had come back for a day or two later on,
+that is after her own second excursion&mdash;that he had
+in fine reappeared on a single occasion on his way
+to the West: his way from Washington as she believed,
+though he was out of sight at the time of her
+joining her friend for their departure. It had not
+occurred to her before to exaggerate&mdash;it had not
+occurred to her that she could; but she seemed to
+become aware to-night that there had been just
+enough in this relation to meet, to provoke, the
+free conception of a little more.
+</p><p>
+She presently put it that, at any rate, promise or
+no promise, Milly would, at a pinch, be able, in
+London, to act on his permission to make him a
+sign; to which Milly replied with readiness that her
+ability, though evident, would be none the less quite
+wasted, inasmuch as the gentleman would, to a certainty,
+be still in America. He had a great deal to
+do there&mdash;which he would scarce have begun; and
+in fact she might very well not have thought of
+London at all if she hadn't been sure he wasn't yet
+near coming back. It was perceptible to her companion
+that the moment our young woman had so
+far committed herself she had a sense of having
+overstepped; which was not quite patched up by
+her saying the next minute, possibly with a certain
+failure of presence of mind, that the last thing she
+desired was the air of running after him. Mrs.
+Stringham wondered privately what question there
+could be of any such appearance&mdash;the danger of
+which thus suddenly came up; but she said, for the
+time, nothing of it&mdash;she only said other things: one
+of which was, for instance, that if Mr. Densher was
+away he was away, and that this was the end of it;
+also that of course they must be discreet at any
+price. But what was the measure of discretion,
+and how was one to be sure? So it was that, as
+they sat there, she produced her own case: <i>she</i> had
+a possible tie with London, which she desired as
+little to disown as she might wish to risk presuming
+on it. She treated her companion, in short, for
+their evening's end, to the story of Maud Manningham,
+the odd but interesting English girl who had
+formed her special affinity in the old days at the
+Vevey school; whom she had written to, after their
+separation, with a regularity that had at first faltered
+and then altogether failed, yet that had been for
+the time quite a fine case of crude constancy; so
+that it had in fact flickered up again of itself on the
+occasion of the marriage of each. They had then
+once more fondly, scrupulously written&mdash;Mrs.
+Lowder first; and even another letter or two had
+afterwards passed. This, however, had been the
+end&mdash;though with no rupture, only a gentle drop:
+Maud Manningham had made, she believed, a great
+marriage, while she herself had made a small; on
+top of which, moreover, distance, difference, diminished
+community and impossible reunion had done
+the rest of the work. It was but after all these years
+that reunion had begun to show as possible&mdash;if the
+other party to it, that is, should be still in existence.
+That was exactly what it now struck our friend as
+interesting to ascertain, as, with one aid and another,
+she believed she might. It was an experiment
+she would at all events now make if Milly
+didn't object.
+</p><p>
+Milly in general objected to nothing, and, though
+she asked a question or two, she raised no
+present plea. Her questions&mdash;or at least her own
+answers to them&mdash;kindled, on Mrs. Stringham's
+part, a backward train: she hadn't known till tonight
+how much she remembered, or how fine it
+might be to see what had become of large, high-coloured
+Maud, florid, exotic and alien&mdash;which had
+been just the spell&mdash;even to the perceptions of
+youth. There was the danger&mdash;she frankly touched
+it&mdash;that such a temperament mightn't have matured,
+with the years, all in the sense of fineness;
+it was the sort of danger that, in renewing relations
+after long breaks, one had always to look in the face.
+To gather in strayed threads was to take a risk&mdash;for
+which, however, she was prepared if Milly was.
+The possible "fun," she confessed, was by itself
+rather tempting; and she fairly sounded, with this&mdash;wound
+up a little as she was&mdash;the note of fun as
+the harmless final right of fifty years of mere New
+England virtue. Among the things she was afterwards
+to recall was the indescribable look dropped
+on her, at this, by her companion; she was still
+seated there between the candles and before the
+finished supper, while Milly moved about, and the
+look was long to figure for her as an inscrutable
+comment on <i>her</i> notion of freedom. Challenged,
+at any rate, as for the last wise word, Milly showed
+perhaps, musingly, charmingly, that, though her
+attention had been mainly soundless, her friend's
+story&mdash;produced as a resource unsuspected, a card
+from up the sleeve&mdash;half surprised, half beguiled
+her. Since the matter, such as it was, depended on
+that, she brought out, before she went to bed, an
+easy, a light "Risk everything!"
+</p><p>
+This quality in it seemed possibly a little to deny
+weight to Maud Lowder's evoked presence&mdash;as
+Susan Stringham, still sitting up, became, in excited
+reflection, a trifle more conscious. Something determinant,
+when the girl had left her, took place in
+her&mdash;nameless but, as soon as she had given way,
+coercive. It was as if she knew again, in this fulness
+of time, that she had been, after Maud's marriage,
+just sensibly outlived or, as people nowadays
+said, shunted. Mrs. Lowder had left her behind,
+and on the occasion, subsequently, of the corresponding
+date in her own life&mdash;not the second, the
+sad one, with its dignity of sadness, but the first,
+with the meagreness of its supposed felicity&mdash;she
+had been, in the same spirit, almost patronisingly
+pitied. If that suspicion, even when it had ceased
+to matter, had never quite died out for her, there
+was doubtless some oddity in its now offering itself
+as a link, rather than as another break, in the chain;
+and indeed there might well have been for her a
+mood in which the notion of the development of
+patronage in her quondam schoolmate would have
+settled her question in another sense. It was actually
+settled&mdash;if the case be worth our analysis&mdash;by
+the happy consummation, the poetic justice, the
+generous revenge, of her having at last something
+to show. Maud, on their parting company, had
+appeared to have so much, and would now&mdash;for
+wasn't it also, in general, quite the rich law of English
+life?&mdash;have, with accretions, promotions, expansions,
+ever so much more. Very good; such
+things might be; she rose to the sense of being
+ready for them. Whatever Mrs. Lowder might
+have to show&mdash;and one hoped one did the presumptions
+all justice&mdash;she would have nothing like Milly
+Theale, who constituted the trophy producible by
+poor Susan. Poor Susan lingered late&mdash;till the
+candles were low, and as soon as the table was
+cleared she opened her neat portfolio. She had not
+lost the old clue; there were connections she remembered,
+addresses she could try; so the thing
+was to begin. She wrote on the spot.
+</p>
+<br>
+<h2 align="center">BOOK FOURTH</h2>
+<br>
+<h2 align="center">VII</h2>
+<br>
+<p>
+It had all gone so fast after this that Milly uttered
+but the truth nearest to hand in saying to the
+gentleman on her right&mdash;who was, by the same
+token, the gentleman on her hostess's left&mdash;that she
+scarce even then knew where she was: the words
+marking her first full sense of a situation really romantic.
+They were already dining, she and her
+friend, at Lancaster Gate, and surrounded, as it
+seemed to her, with every English accessory; though
+her consciousness of Mrs. Lowder's existence, and
+still more of her remarkable identity, had been of so
+recent and so sudden a birth. Susie, as she was apt
+to call her companion for a lighter change, had only
+had to wave a neat little wand for the fairy-tale to
+begin at once; in consequence of which Susie now
+glittered&mdash;for, with Mrs. Stringham's new sense of
+success, it came to that&mdash;in the character of a fairy
+godmother. Milly had almost insisted on dressing
+her, for the present occasion, as one; and it was no
+fault of the girl's if the good lady had not now appeared
+in a peaked hat, a short petticoat and diamond
+shoe-buckles, brandishing the magic crutch.
+The good lady, in truth, bore herself not less contentedly
+than if these insignia had marked her
+work; and Milly's observation to Lord Mark had
+just been, doubtless, the result of such a light exchange
+of looks with her as even the great length
+of the table had not baffled. There were twenty
+persons between them, but this sustained passage
+was the sharpest sequel yet to that other comparison
+of views during the pause on the Swiss pass.
+It almost appeared to Milly that their fortune had
+been unduly precipitated&mdash;as if, properly, they were
+in the position of having ventured on a small joke
+and found the answer out of proportion grave.
+She could not at this moment, for instance, have
+said whether, with her quickened perceptions, she
+were more enlivened or oppressed; and the case
+might in fact have been serious had she not, by
+good fortune, from the moment the picture loomed,
+quickly made up her mind that what finally most
+concerned her was neither to seek nor to shirk,
+was not even to wonder too much, but was to let
+things come as they would, since there was little
+enough doubt of how they would go.
+</p><p>
+Lord Mark had been brought to her before dinner&mdash;not
+by Mrs. Lowder, but by the handsome
+girl, that lady's niece, who was now at the other
+end and on the same side as Susie; he had taken
+her in, and she meant presently to ask him about
+Miss Croy, the handsome girl, actually offered to
+her sight&mdash;though now in a splendid way&mdash;but for
+the second time. The first time had been the occasion&mdash;only
+three days before&mdash;of her calling at
+their hotel with her aunt and then making, for our
+other two heroines, a great impression of beauty
+and eminence. This impression had remained so
+with Milly that, at present, and although her attention
+was aware at the same time of everything
+else, her eyes were mainly engaged with Kate
+Croy when not engaged with Susie. That wonderful
+creature's eyes moreover readily met them&mdash;she
+ranked now as a wonderful creature; and
+it seemed a part of the swift prosperity of the
+American visitors that, so little in the original reckoning,
+she should yet appear conscious, charmingly,
+frankly conscious, of possibilities of friendship for
+them. Milly had easily and, as a guest, gracefully
+generalised: English girls had a special, strong
+beauty, and it particularly showed in evening dress&mdash;above
+all when, as was strikingly the case with
+this one, the dress itself was what it should be.
+That observation she had all ready for Lord Mark
+when they should, after a little, get round to it.
+She seemed even now to see that there might be a
+good deal they would get round to; the indication
+being that, taken up once for all with her other
+neighbour, their hostess would leave them much to
+themselves. Mrs. Lowder's other neighbour was
+the Bishop of Murrum&mdash;a real bishop, such as Milly
+had never seen, with a complicated costume, a voice
+like an old-fashioned wind instrument, and a face
+all the portrait of a prelate; while the gentleman on
+our young lady's left, a gentleman thick-necked,
+large and literal, who looked straight before him
+and as if he were not to be diverted by vain words
+from that pursuit, clearly counted as an offset to
+the possession of Lord Mark. As Milly made out
+these things&mdash;with a shade of exhilaration at the
+way she already fell in&mdash;she saw how she was justified
+of her plea for people and her love of life. It
+wasn't then, as the prospect seemed to show, so difficult
+to get into the current, or to stand, at any
+rate, on the bank. It was easy to get near&mdash;if they
+<i>were</i> near; and yet the elements were different
+enough from any of her old elements, and positively
+rich and strange.
+</p><p>
+She asked herself if her right-hand neighbour
+would understand what she meant by such a description
+of them, should she throw it off; but another
+of the things to which, precisely, her sense
+was awakened was that no, decidedly, he wouldn't.
+It was nevertheless by this time open to her that
+his line would be to be clever; and indeed, evidently,
+no little of the interest was going to be in
+the fresh reference and fresh effect both of people's
+cleverness and of their simplicity. She thrilled, she
+consciously flushed, and turned pale with the certitude&mdash;it
+had never been so present&mdash;that she
+should find herself completely involved: the very
+air of the place, the pitch of the occasion, had for
+her so positive a taste and so deep an undertone.
+The smallest things, the faces, the hands, the jewels
+of the women, the sound of words, especially of
+names, across the table, the shape of the forks, the
+arrangement of the flowers, the attitude of the servants,
+the walls of the room, were all touches in a
+picture and denotements in a play; and they marked
+for her, moreover, her alertness of vision. She had
+never, she might well believe, been in such a state
+of vibration; her sensibility was almost too sharp
+for her comfort: there were, for example, more indications
+than she could reduce to order in the manner
+of the friendly niece, who struck her as distinguished
+and interesting, as in fact surprisingly
+genial. This young woman's type had, visibly,
+other possibilities; yet here, of its own free movement,
+it had already sketched a relation. Were
+they, Miss Croy and she, to take up the tale where
+their two elders had left it off so many years before?&mdash;were
+they to find they liked each other and to
+try for themselves if a scheme of constancy on more
+modern lines could be worked? She had doubted,
+as they came to England, of Maud Manningham,
+had believed her a broken reed and a vague resource,
+had seen their dependence on her as a state
+of mind that would have been shamefully silly&mdash;so
+far as it <i>was</i> dependence&mdash;had they wished to do
+any thing so inane as "get into society." To have
+made their pilgrimage all for the sake of such society
+as Mrs. Lowder might have in reserve for them&mdash;that
+didn't bear thinking of at all, and she herself
+had quite chosen her course for curiosity about
+other matters. She would have described this curiosity
+as a desire to see the places she had read about,
+and <i>that</i> description of her motive she was prepared
+to give her neighbour&mdash;even though, as a consequence
+of it, he should find how little she had read.
+It was almost at present as if her poor prevision had
+been rebuked by the majesty&mdash;she could scarcely
+call it less&mdash;of the event, or at all events by the commanding
+character of the two figures&mdash;she could
+scarcely call <i>that</i> less either&mdash;mainly presented.
+Mrs. Lowder and her niece, however dissimilar, had
+at least in common that each was a great reality.
+That was true, primarily, of the aunt&mdash;so true that
+Milly wondered how her own companion had arrived,
+in other days, at so odd an alliance; yet she
+none the less felt Mrs. Lowder as a person of whom
+the mind might in two or three days roughly make
+the circuit. She would sit there massive, at least,
+while one attempted it; whereas Miss Croy, the
+handsome girl, would indulge in incalculable movements
+that might interfere with one's tour. She
+was real, none the less, and everything and everybody
+were real; and it served them right, no doubt,
+the pair of them, for having rushed into their adventure.
+</p><p>
+Lord Mark's intelligence meanwhile, however,
+had met her own quite sufficiently to enable him to
+tell her how little he could clear up her situation.
+He explained, for that matter&mdash;or at least he hinted&mdash;that
+there was no such thing, to-day in London,
+as saying where any one was. Every one was
+everywhere&mdash;nobody was anywhere. He should
+be put to it&mdash;yes, frankly&mdash;to give a name of any
+sort or kind to their hostess's "set." <i>Was</i> it a set
+at all, or wasn't it, and were there not really no such
+things as sets, in the place, any more?&mdash;was there
+any thing but the senseless shifting tumble, like
+that of some great greasy sea in mid-Channel, of
+an overwhelming melted mixture? He threw out
+the question, which seemed large; Milly felt that
+at the end of five minutes he had thrown out a great
+many, though he followed none more than a step or
+two; perhaps he would prove suggestive, but he
+helped her as yet to no discriminations: he spoke
+as if he had given them up from too much knowledge.
+He was thus at the opposite extreme from
+herself, but, as a consequence of it, also wandering
+and lost; and he was furthermore, for all his temporary
+incoherence, to which she guessed there
+would be some key, as great a reality as either Mrs.
+Lowder or Kate. The only light in which he
+placed the former of these ladies was that of
+an extraordinary woman&mdash;a most extraordinary
+woman, and "the more extraordinary the more one
+knows her," while of the latter he said nothing, for
+the moment, but that she was tremendously, yes,
+quite tremendously, good-looking. It was some
+time, she thought, before his talk showed his cleverness,
+and yet each minute she believed in it more,
+quite apart from what her hostess had told her on
+first naming him. Perhaps he was one of the cases
+she had heard of at home&mdash;those characteristic
+cases of people in England who concealed their play
+of mind so much more than they showed it. Even
+Mr. Densher a little did that. And what made Lord
+Mark, at any rate, so real either, when this was a
+thing he so definitely insisted on? His type some
+how, as by a life, a need, an intention of its own, insisted
+<i>for</i> him; but that was all. It was difficult to
+guess his age&mdash;whether he were a young man who
+looked old or an old man who looked young; it
+seemed to prove nothing, as against other things,
+that he was bald and, as might have been said,
+slightly stale, or, more delicately perhaps, dry:
+there was such a fine little fidget of preoccupied life
+in him, and his eyes, at moments&mdash;though it was an
+appearance they could suddenly lose&mdash;were as candid
+and clear as those of a pleasant boy. Very neat,
+very light, and so fair that there was little other indication
+of his moustache than his constantly feeling
+it&mdash;which was again boyish&mdash;he would have
+affected her as the most intellectual person present
+if he had not affected her as the most frivolous.
+The latter quality was rather in his look than in anything
+else, though he constantly wore his double
+eyeglass, which was, much more, Bostonian and
+thoughtful.
+</p><p>
+The idea of his frivolity had, no doubt, to do with
+his personal designation, which represented&mdash;as yet,
+for our young woman, a little confusedly&mdash;a connection
+with an historic patriciate, a class that, in
+turn, also confusedly, represented an affinity with a
+social element that she had never heard otherwise
+described than as "fashion." The supreme social
+element in New York had never known itself but
+as reduced to that category, and though Milly was
+aware that, as applied to a territorial and political
+aristocracy, the label was probably too simple, she
+had for the time none other at hand. She presently,
+it is true, enriched her idea with the perception
+that her interlocutor was indifferent; yet this, indifferent
+as aristocracies notoriously were, saw her but
+little further, inasmuch as she felt that, in the first
+place, he would much rather get on with her than
+not, and in the second was only thinking of too
+many matters of his own. If he kept her in view
+on the one hand and kept so much else on the other&mdash;the
+way he crumbed up his bread was a proof&mdash;why
+did he hover before her as a potentially insolent
+noble? She couldn't have answered the question,
+and it was precisely one of those that swarmed.
+They were complicated, she might fairly have said,
+by his visibly knowing, having known from afar off,
+that she was a stranger and an American, and by
+his none the less making no more of it than if she
+and her like were the chief of his diet. He took
+her, kindly enough, but imperturbably, irreclaimably,
+for granted, and it wouldn't in the least help
+that she herself knew him, as quickly, for having
+been in her country and threshed it out. There
+would be nothing for her to explain or attenuate
+or brag about; she could neither escape nor prevail
+by her strangeness; he would have, for that matter,
+on such a subject, more to tell her than to learn
+from her. She might learn from <i>him</i> why she was
+so different from the handsome girl&mdash;which she
+didn't know, being merely able to feel it; or at any
+rate might learn from him why the handsome girl
+was so different from her.
+</p><p>
+On these lines, however, they would move later;
+the lines immediately laid down were, in spite of his
+vagueness for his own convenience, definite enough.
+She was already, he observed to her, thinking what
+she should say on her other side&mdash;which was what
+Americans were always doing. She needn't in conscience
+say anything at all; but Americans never
+knew that, nor ever, poor creatures, yes (<i>she</i> had
+interposed the "poor creatures!") what not to do.
+The burdens they took on&mdash;the things, positively,
+they made an affair of! This easy and, after all,
+friendly jibe at her race was really for her, on her
+new friend's part, the note of personal recognition
+so far as she required it; and she gave him a prompt
+and conscious example of morbid anxiety by insisting
+that her desire to be, herself, "lovely" all round
+was justly founded on the lovely way Mrs. Lowder
+had met her. He was directly interested in that,
+and it was not till afterwards that she fully knew
+how much more information about their friend he
+had taken than given. Here again, for instance,
+was a pertinent note for her: she had, on the spot,
+with her first plunge into the obscure depths of a
+society constituted from far back, encountered the
+interesting phenomenon of complicated, of possibly
+sinister motive. However, Maud Manningham
+(her name, even in her presence, somehow still fed
+the fancy) <i>had,</i> all the same, been lovely, and one
+was going to meet her now quite as far on as one
+had one's self been met. She had been with them
+at their hotel&mdash;they were a pair&mdash;before even they
+had supposed she could have got their letter. Of
+course indeed they had written in advance, but they
+had followed that up very fast. She had thus engaged
+them to dine but two days later, and on the
+morrow again, without waiting for a return visit,
+waiting for anything, she had called with her niece.
+It was as if she really cared for them, and it was
+magnificent fidelity&mdash;fidelity to Mrs. Stringham,
+her own companion and Mrs. Lowder's former
+schoolmate, the lady with the charming face and the
+rather high dress down there at the end.
+</p><p>
+Lord Mark took in through his nippers these
+balanced attributes of Susie. "But isn't Mrs.
+Stringham's fidelity then equally magnificent?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, it's a beautiful sentiment; but it isn't as
+if she had anything to <i>give."</i>
+</p><p>
+"Hasn't she got you?" Lord Mark presently
+asked.
+</p><p>
+"Me&mdash;to give Mrs. Lowder?" Milly had clearly not
+yet seen herself in the light of such an offering.
+"Oh, I'm rather a poor present; and I don't
+feel as if, even at that, I've as yet quite been given."
+</p><p>
+"You've been shown, and if our friend has
+jumped at you it comes to the same thing." He
+made his jokes, Lord Mark, without amusement
+for himself; yet it wasn't that he was grim. "To
+be seen you must recognise, <i>is,</i> for you, to be
+jumped at; and, if it's a question of being shown,
+here you are again. Only it has now been taken
+out of your friend's hands; it's Mrs. Lowder, already,
+who's getting the benefit. Look round the
+table and you'll make out, I think, that you're being,
+from top to bottom, jumped at."
+</p><p>
+"Well, then," said Milly, "I seem also to feel
+that I like it better than being made fun of."
+</p><p>
+It was one of the things she afterwards saw&mdash;Milly
+was for ever seeing things afterwards&mdash;that
+her companion had here had some way of his own,
+quite unlike any one's else, of assuring her of his
+consideration. She wondered how he had done it,
+for he had neither apologised nor protested. She
+said to herself, at any rate, that he had led her on;
+and what was most odd was the question by which he
+had done so. "Does she know much about you?"
+</p><p>
+"No, she just likes us."
+</p><p>
+Even for this his travelled lordship, seasoned and
+saturated, had no laugh. "I mean <i>you</i> particularly.
+Has that lady with the charming face, which
+<i>is</i> charming, told her?"
+</p><p>
+Milly hesitated. "Told her what?"
+</p><p>
+"Everything."
+</p><p>
+This, with the way he dropped it, again considerably
+moved her&mdash;made her feel for a moment that,
+as a matter of course, she was a subject for disclosures.
+But she quickly found her answer. "Oh, as
+for that, you must ask <i>her."</i>
+</p><p>
+"Your clever companion?"
+</p><p>
+"Mrs. Lowder."
+</p><p>
+He replied to this that their hostess was a person
+with whom there were certain liberties one never
+took, but that he was none the less fairly upheld,
+inasmuch as she was for the most part kind to him
+and as, should he be very good for a while, she
+would probably herself tell him. "And I shall
+have, at any rate, in the meantime, the interest of
+seeing what she does with you. That will teach
+me more or less, you see, how much she knows."
+</p><p>
+Milly followed this&mdash;it was lucid; but it suggested
+something apart. "How much does she know
+about <i>you?"</i>
+</p><p>
+"Nothing," said Lord Mark serenely. "But
+that doesn't matter&mdash;for what she does with me."
+And then, as to anticipate Milly's question about
+the nature of such doing: "This, for instance&mdash;turning
+me straight on for <i>you."</i>
+</p><p>
+The girl thought. "And you mean she wouldn't
+if she did know&mdash;&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+He met it as if it were really a point. "No. I
+believe, to do her justice, she still would. So you
+can be easy."
+</p><p>
+Milly had the next instant, then, acted on the
+permission. "Because you're even at the worst
+the best thing she has?"
+</p><p>
+With this he was at last amused. "I was till you
+came. You're the best now."
+</p><p>
+It was strange his words should have given her
+the sense of his knowing, but it was positive that
+they did so, and to the extent of making her believe
+them, though still with wonder. That, really, from
+this first of their meetings, was what was most to
+abide with her: she accepted almost helplessly, she
+surrendered to the inevitability of being the sort of
+thing, as he might have said, that he at least thoroughly
+believed he had, in going about, seen here
+enough of for all practical purposes. Her submission
+was naturally, moreover, not to be impaired by
+her learning later on that he had paid at short intervals,
+though at a time apparently just previous to
+her own emergence from the obscurity of extreme
+youth, three separate visits to New York, where his
+nameable friends and his contrasted contacts had
+been numerous. His impression, his recollection of
+the whole mixed quantity, was still visibly rich. It
+had helped him to place her, and she was more and
+more sharply conscious of having&mdash;as with the door
+sharply slammed upon her and the guard's hand
+raised in signal to the train&mdash;been popped into the
+compartment in which she was to travel for him.
+It was a use of her that many a girl would have been
+doubtless quick to resent; and the kind of mind that
+thus, in our young lady, made all for mere seeing and
+taking is precisely one of the charms of our subject.
+Milly had practically just learned from him, had
+made out, as it were, from her rumbling compartment,
+that he gave her the highest place among their
+friend's actual properties. She was a success, that
+was what it came to, he presently assured her, and
+that was what it was to be a success: it always happened
+before one could know it. One's ignorance
+was in fact often the greatest part of it. "You
+haven't had time yet," he said; "this is nothing.
+But you'll see. You'll see everything. You can,
+you know&mdash;everything you dream of."
+</p><p>
+He made her more and more wonder; she almost
+felt as if he were showing her visions while he spoke;
+and strangely enough, though it was visions that had
+drawn her on, she hadn't seen them in connection&mdash;that
+is in such preliminary and necessary connection&mdash;with
+such a face as Lord Mark's, such eyes and
+such a voice, such a tone and such a manner. He
+had for an instant the effect of making her ask herself
+if she were after all going to be afraid; so distinct
+was it for fifty seconds that a fear passed over
+her. There they were again&mdash;yes, certainly: Susie's
+overture to Mrs. Lowder had been their joke, but
+they had pressed in that gaiety an electric bell that
+continued to sound. Positively, while she sat there,
+she had the loud rattle in her ears, and she wondered,
+during these moments, why the others didn't hear it.
+They didn't stare, they didn't smile, and the fear in
+her that I speak of was but her own desire to stop it.
+That dropped, however, as if the alarm itself had
+ceased; she seemed to have seen in a quick, though
+tempered glare that there were two courses for her,
+one to leave London again the first thing in the morning,
+the other to do nothing at all. Well, she would
+do nothing at all; she was already doing it; more
+than that, she had already done it, and her chance
+was gone. She gave herself up&mdash;she had the
+strangest sense, on the spot, of so deciding; for she
+had turned a corner before she went on again with
+Lord Mark. Inexpressive, but intensely significant,
+he met as no one else could have done the very question
+she had suddenly put to Mrs. Stringham on the
+Brünig. Should she have it, whatever she did have,
+that question had been, for long? "Ah, so possibly
+not," her neighbour appeared to reply; "therefore,
+don't you see? <i>I'm</i> the way." It was vivid that he
+might be, in spite of his absence of flourish; the way
+being doubtless just <i>in</i> that absence. The handsome
+girl, whom she didn't lose sight of and who, she felt,
+kept her also in view&mdash;Mrs. Lowder's striking niece
+would, perhaps, be the way as well, for in her too
+was the absence of flourish, though she had little else,
+so far as one could tell, in common with Lord Mark.
+Yet how indeed <i>could</i> one tell, what did one understand,
+and of what was one, for that matter, provisionally
+conscious but of their being somehow together
+in what they represented? Kate Croy, fine
+but friendly, looked over at her as really with a guess
+at Lord Mark's effect on her. If she could guess
+this effect what then did she know about it and in
+what degree had she felt it herself? Did that represent,
+as between them, anything particular, and
+should she have to count with them as duplicating,
+as intensifying by a mutual intelligence, the relation
+into which she was sinking? Nothing was so odd
+as that she should have to recognise so quickly in
+each of these glimpses of an instant the various signs
+of a relation; and this anomaly itself, had she had
+more time to give to it, might well, might almost terribly
+have suggested to her that her doom was to live
+fast. It was queerly a question of the short run and
+the consciousness proportionately crowded.
+</p><p>
+These were immense excursions for the spirit of
+a young person at Mrs. Lowder's mere dinner-party;
+but what was so significant and so admonitory as the
+fact of their being possible? What could they have
+been but just a part, already, of the crowded consciousness?
+And it was just a part, likewise, that
+while plates were changed and dishes presented and
+periods in the banquet marked; while appearances
+insisted and phenomena multiplied and words
+reached her from here and there like plashes of a
+slow, thick tide; while Mrs. Lowder grew somehow
+more stout and more instituted and Susie, at her
+distance and in comparison, more thinly improvised
+and more different&mdash;different, that is, from every
+one and everything: it was just a part that while
+this process went forward our young lady alighted,
+came back, taking up her destiny again as if she had
+been able by a wave or two of her wings to place
+herself briefly in sight of an alternative to it. Whatever
+it was it had showed in this brief interval as
+better than the alternative; and it now presented itself
+altogether in the image and in the place in which
+she had left it. The image was that of her being,
+as Lord Mark had declared, a success. This depended
+more or less of course on his idea of the thing&mdash;into
+which at present, however, she wouldn't go.
+But, renewing soon, she had asked him what he
+meant then that Mrs. Lowder would do with her,
+and he had replied that this might safely be left.
+"She'll get back," he pleasantly said, "her money."
+He could say it too&mdash;which was singular&mdash;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."
+</p><p>
+"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, <i>don't</i> feel that they
+lose."
+</p><p>
+Lord Mark seemed, within the limits of his enthusiasm,
+to find this charming. "Ah, she strikes
+you as an idealist?"
+</p><p>
+"She idealises <i>us,</i> my friend and me, absolutely.
+She sees us in a light," said Milly. "That's all I've
+got to hold on by. So don't deprive me of it."
+</p><p>
+"I wouldn't for the world. But do you think," he
+continued as if it were suddenly important for him&mdash;"do
+you think she sees <i>me</i> in a light?"
+</p><p>
+She neglected his question for a little, partly because
+her attention attached itself more and more to
+the handsome girl, partly because, placed so near
+their hostess, she wished not to show as discussing
+her too freely. Mrs. Lowder, it was true, steering
+in the other quarter a course in which she called at
+subjects as if they were islets in an archipelago, continued
+to allow them their ease, and Kate Croy, at
+the same time, steadily revealed herself as interesting.
+Milly in fact found, of a sudden, her ease&mdash;found
+it all&mdash;as she bethought herself that what Mrs.
+Lowder was really arranging for was a report on
+her quality and, as perhaps might be said, her value
+from Lord Mark. She wished him, the wonderful
+lady, to have no pretext for not knowing what he
+thought of Miss Theale. Why his judgment so
+mattered remained to be seen; but it was this divination,
+in any case, that now determined Milly's rejoinder.
+"No. She knows you. She has probably
+reason to. And you all, here, know each other&mdash;I
+see that&mdash;so far as you know anything. You
+know what you're used to, and it's your being used
+to it&mdash;that, and that only&mdash;that makes you. But
+there are things you don't know."
+</p><p>
+He took it in as if it might fairly, to do him justice,
+be a point. "Things that <i>I</i> don't&mdash;with all the
+pains I take and the way I've run about the world
+to leave nothing unlearned?"
+</p><p>
+Milly thought, and it was perhaps the very truth
+of his claim&mdash;its not being negligible&mdash;that sharpened
+her impatience and thereby her wit. "You're
+<i>blasé,</i> but you're not enlightened. You're familiar
+with everything, but conscious, really of nothing.
+What I mean is that you've no imagination."
+</p><p>
+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. Lowder, however, only smiled on Milly
+for a sign that something racy was what she had
+expected, and resumed, with a splash of her screw,
+her cruise among the islands. "Oh, I've heard
+that," the young man replied, "before!"
+</p><p>
+"There it is then. You've heard everything before.
+You've heard <i>me</i> of course before, in my
+country, often enough."
+</p><p>
+"Oh, never too often," he protested; "I'm sure
+I hope I shall still hear you again and again."
+</p><p>
+"But what good then has it done you?" the girl
+went on as if now frankly to amuse him.
+</p><p>
+"Oh, you'll see when you know me."
+</p><p>
+"But, most assuredly, I shall never know you."
+</p><p>
+"Then that will be exactly," he laughed, "the
+good!"
+</p><p>
+If it established thus that they couldn't, or
+Wouldn't, mix, why, none the less, did Milly feel,
+through it, a perverse quickening of the relation to
+which she had been, in spite of herself, appointed?
+</p><p>
+What queerer consequence of their not mixing than
+their talking&mdash;for it was what they had arrived at&mdash;almost
+intimately? She wished to get away from
+him, or indeed, much rather, away from herself so
+far as she was present to him. She saw already&mdash;wonderful
+creature, after all, herself too&mdash;that there
+would be a good deal more of him to come for her,
+and that the special sign of their intercourse would
+be to keep herself out of the question. Everything
+else might come in&mdash;only never that; and with such
+an arrangement they might even go far. This in
+fact might quite have begun, on the spot, with her
+returning again to the topic of the handsome girl.
+If she was to keep herself out she could naturally best
+do so by putting in somebody else. She accordingly
+put in Kate Croy, being ready to that extent&mdash;as she
+was not at all afraid for her&mdash;to sacrifice her if necessary.
+Lord Mark himself, for that matter, had
+made it easy by saying a little while before that no
+one among them did anything for nothing. "What
+then"&mdash;she was aware of being abrupt&mdash;"does
+Miss Croy, if she's so interested, do it for? What
+has she to gain by <i>her</i> lovely welcome? Look at
+her <i>now!"</i> Milly broke out with characteristic
+freedom of praise, though pulling herself up also
+with a compunctious "Oh!" as the direction thus
+given to their eyes happened to coincide with a turn
+of Kate's face to them. All she had meant to do
+was to insist that this face was fine; but what she
+had in fact done was to renew again her effect of
+showing herself to its possessor as conjoined with
+Lord Mark for some interested view of it. He had,
+however, promptly met her question.
+</p><p>
+"To gain? Why, your acquaintance."
+</p><p>
+"Well, what's my acquaintance to her? She can
+care for me&mdash;she must feel that&mdash;only by being sorry
+for me; and that's why she's lovely: to be already
+willing to take the trouble to be. It's the height of
+the disinterested."
+</p><p>
+There were more things in this than one that
+Lord Mark might have taken up; but in a minute
+he had made his choice. "Ah then, I'm nowhere,
+for I'm afraid <i>I'm</i> not sorry for you in the least.
+What do you make then," he asked, "of your success?"
+</p><p>
+"Why, just the great reason of all. It's just because
+our friend there sees it that she pities me. She
+understands," Milly said; "she's better than any of
+you. She's beautiful."
+</p><p>
+He appeared struck with this at last&mdash;with the
+point the girl made of it; to which she came back
+even after a diversion created by a dish presented
+between them. "Beautiful in character, I see. <i>Is</i>
+she so? You must tell me about her."
+</p><p>
+Milly wondered. "But haven't you known her
+longer than I? Haven't you seen her for yourself?"
+</p><p>
+"No&mdash;I've failed with her. It's no use. I don't
+make her out. And I assure you I really should like
+to." His assurance had in fact for his companion a
+positive suggestion of sincerity; he affected her as
+now saying something that he felt; and she was the
+more struck with it as she was still conscious of the
+failure even of curiosity he had just shown in respect
+to herself. She had meant something&mdash;though indeed
+for herself almost only&mdash;in speaking of their
+friend's natural pity; it had been a note, doubtless, of
+questionable taste, but it had quavered out in spite of
+her; and he had not so much as cared to inquire
+"Why 'natural'?" Not that it wasn't really much
+better for her that he shouldn't: explanations would
+in truth have taken her much too far. Only she now
+perceived that, in comparison, her word about this
+other person really "drew" him; and there were
+things in that, probably, many things, as to which
+she would learn more and which glimmered there
+already as part and parcel of that larger "real" with
+which, in her new situation, she was to be beguiled.
+It was in fact at the very moment, this element, not
+absent from what Lord Mark was further saying.
+"So you're wrong, you see, as to our knowing all
+about each other. There are cases where we break
+down. I at any rate give <i>her</i> up&mdash;up, that is, to you.
+You must do her for me&mdash;tell me, I mean, when you
+know more. You'll notice," he pleasantly wound
+up, "that I've confidence in you."
+</p><p>
+"Why shouldn't you have?" Milly asked, observing
+in this, as she thought, a fine, though, for such
+a man, a surprisingly artless, fatuity. It was as if
+there might have been a question of her falsifying
+for the sake of her own show&mdash;that is of her honesty
+not being proof against her desire to keep well with
+him herself. She didn't, none the less, otherwise
+protest against his remark; there was something else
+she was occupied in seeing. It was the handsome
+girl alone, one of his own species and his own society,
+who had made him feel uncertain; of his certainties
+about a mere little American, a cheap exotic, imported
+almost wholesale, and whose habitat, with its
+conditions of climate, growth, and cultivation, its
+immense profusion, but its few varieties and thin
+development, he was perfectly satisfied. The marvel
+was, too, that Milly understood his satisfaction&mdash;feeling
+that she expressed the truth in presently
+saying: "Of course; I make out that she must be
+difficult; just as I see that I myself must be easy."
+And that was what, for all the rest of this occasion,
+remained with her&mdash;as the most interesting thing
+that could remain. She was more and more content
+herself to be easy; she would have been resigned,
+even had it been brought straighter home to her, to
+passing for a cheap exotic. Provisionally, at any
+rate, that protected her wish to keep herself, with
+Lord Mark, in abeyance. They <i>had</i> all affected her
+as inevitably knowing each other, and if the handsome
+girl's place among them was something even
+their initiation couldn't deal with&mdash;why, then, she
+would indeed be a quantity.
+</p>
+<br>
+<h2 align="center">VIII</h2>
+<br>
+<p>
+That sense of quantities, separate or mixed, was
+indeed doubtless what most prevailed at first for our
+slightly gasping American pair; it found utterance
+for them in their frequent remark to each other that
+they had no one but themselves to thank. It dropped
+from Milly more than once that if she had ever
+known it was so easy&mdash;! though her exclamation
+mostly ended without completing her idea. This,
+however, was a trifle to Mrs. Stringham, who cared
+little whether she meant that in this case she would
+have come sooner. She couldn't have come sooner,
+and she perhaps, on the contrary, meant&mdash;for it
+would have been like her&mdash;that she wouldn't have
+come at all; why it was so easy being at any rate
+a matter as to which her companion had begun
+quickly to pick up views. Susie kept some of these
+lights for the present to herself, since, freely communicated,
+they might have been a little disturbing;
+with which, moreover, the quantities that we speak
+of as surrounding the two ladies were, in many cases,
+quantities of things&mdash;and of other things&mdash;to talk
+about. Their immediate lesson, accordingly, was
+that they just had been caught up by the incalculable
+strength of a wave that was actually holding them
+aloft and that would naturally dash them wherever
+it liked. They meanwhile, we hasten to add, make
+the best of their precarious position, and if Milly had
+had no other help for it she would have found not
+a little in the sight of Susan Shepherd's state. The
+girl had had nothing to say to her, for three days,
+about the "success" announced by Lord Mark&mdash;which
+they saw, besides, otherwise established; she
+was too taken up, too touched, by Susie's own exaltation.
+Susie glowed in the light of her justified
+faith; everything had happened that she had been
+acute enough to think least probable; she had appealed
+to a possible delicacy in Maud Manningham&mdash;a
+delicacy, mind you, but <i>barely</i> possible&mdash;and her
+appeal had been met in a way that was an honour to
+human nature. This proved sensibility of the lady
+of Lancaster Gate performed verily, for both our
+friends, during these first days, the office of a fine
+floating gold-dust, something that threw over the
+prospect a harmonising blur. The forms, the colours
+behind it were strong and deep&mdash;we have seen how
+they already stood out for Milly; but nothing, comparatively,
+had had so much of the dignity of truth
+as the fact of Maud's fidelity to a sentiment. That
+was what Susie was proud of, much more than of
+her great place in the world, which she was moreover
+conscious of not as yet wholly measuring. That
+was what was more vivid even than her being&mdash;in
+senses more worldly and in fact almost in the degree
+of a revelation&mdash;English and distinct and positive,
+with almost no inward, but with the finest outward
+resonance.
+</p><p>
+Susan Shepherd's word for her, again and again,
+was that she was "large"; yet it was not exactly a
+case, as to the soul, of echoing chambers: she might
+have been likened rather to a capacious receptacle,
+originally perhaps loose, but now drawn as tightly
+as possible over its accumulated contents&mdash;a packed
+mass, for her American admirer, of curious detail.
+When the latter good lady, at home, had handsomely
+figured her friends as not small&mdash;which was the way
+she mostly figured them&mdash;there was a certain implication
+that they were spacious because they were
+empty. Mrs. Lowder, by a different law, was spacious
+because she was full, because she had something
+in common, even in repose, with a projectile,
+of great size, loaded and ready for use. That indeed,
+to Susie's romantic mind, announced itself as
+half the charm of their renewal&mdash;a charm as of sitting
+in springtime, during a long peace, on the
+daisied, grassy bank of some great slumbering fortress.
+True to her psychological instincts, certainly,
+Mrs. Stringham had noted that the "sentiment"
+she rejoiced in on her old schoolmate's part was all
+a matter of action and movement, was not, save for
+the interweaving of a more frequent plump "dearest"
+than she would herself perhaps have used, a
+matter of much other embroidery. She brooded,
+with interest, on this further remark of race, feeling
+in her own spirit a different economy. The joy, for
+her, was to know <i>why</i> she acted&mdash;the reason was
+half the business; whereas with Mrs. Lowder there
+might have been no reason: "why" was the trivial
+seasoning-substance, the vanilla or the nutmeg, omittable
+from the nutritive pudding without spoiling it.
+Mrs. Lowder's desire was clearly sharp that their
+young companions should also prosper together;
+and Mrs. Stringham's account of it all to Milly, during
+the first days, was that when, at Lancaster Gate,
+she was not occupied in telling, as it were, about her,
+she was occupied in hearing much of the history of
+her hostess's brilliant niece.
+</p><p>
+They had plenty, on these lines, the two elder
+women, to give and to take, and it was even not quite
+clear to the pilgrim from Boston that what she
+should mainly have arranged for in London was not
+a series of thrills for herself. She had a bad conscience,
+indeed almost a sense of immorality, in having
+to recognise that she was, as she said, carried
+away. She laughed to Milly when she also said that
+she didn't know where it would end; and the principal
+of her uneasiness was that Mrs. Lowder's life
+bristled for her with elements that she was really
+having to look at for the first time. They represented,
+she believed, the world, the world that, as a consequence
+of the cold shoulder turned to it by the
+Pilgrim Fathers, had never yet boldly crossed to Boston&mdash;it
+would surely have sunk the stoutest Cunarder&mdash;and
+she couldn't pretend that she faced the
+prospect simply because Milly had had a caprice.
+She was in the act herself of having one, directed
+precisely to their present spectacle. She could but
+seek strength in the thought that she had never had
+one&mdash;or had never yielded to one, which came to the
+same thing&mdash;before. The sustaining sense of it all,
+moreover, as literary material&mdash;that quite dropped
+from her. She must wait, at any rate, she should
+see: it struck her, so far as she had got, as vast, obscure,
+lurid. She reflected in the watches of the
+night that she was probably just going to love it for
+itself&mdash;that is for itself and Milly. The odd thing
+was that she could think of Milly's loving it without
+dread&mdash;or with dread, at least not on the score of
+conscience, only on the score of peace. It was a
+mercy, at all events, for the hour, that their fancies
+jumped together.
+</p><p>
+While, for this first week that followed their dinner,
+she drank deep at Lancaster Gate, her companion
+was no less happily, appeared to be indeed on the
+whole quite as romantically, provided for. The
+handsome English girl from the heavy English house
+had been as a figure in a picture stepping by magic
+out of its frame: it was a case, in truth, for which
+Mrs. Stringham presently found the perfect image.
+She had lost none of her grasp, but quite the contrary,
+of that other conceit in virtue of which Milly
+was the wandering princess: so what could be more
+in harmony now than to see the princess waited upon
+at the city gate by the worthiest maiden, the chosen
+daughter of the burgesses? It was the real again,
+evidently, the amusement of the meeting for the
+princess too; princesses living for the most part, in
+such an appeased way, on the plane of mere elegant
+representation. That was why they pounced, at city
+gates, on deputed flower-strewing damsels; that was
+why, after effigies, processions, and other stately
+games, frank human company was pleasant to them.
+Kate Croy really presented herself to Milly&mdash;the latter
+abounded for Mrs. Stringham in accounts of it&mdash;as
+the wondrous London girl in person, by what
+she had conceived, from far back, of the London
+girl; conceived from the tales of travellers and the
+anecdotes of New York, from old porings over
+<i>Punch</i> and a liberal acquaintance with the fiction of
+the day. The only thing was that she was nicer,
+for the creature in question had rather been, to our
+young woman, an image of dread. She had thought
+of her, at her best, as handsome just as Kate was,
+with turns of head and tones of voice, felicities of
+stature and attitude, things "put on" and, for that
+matter, put off, all the marks of the product of a
+packed society who should be at the same time the
+heroine of a strong story. She placed this striking
+young person from the first in a story, saw her, by a
+necessity of the imagination, for a heroine, felt it the
+only character in which she wouldn't be wasted; and
+this in spite of the heroine's pleasant abruptness, her
+forbearance from gush, her umbrellas and jackets
+and shoes&mdash;as these things sketched themselves to
+Milly&mdash;and something rather of a breezy boy in the
+carriage of her arms and the occasional freedom of
+her slang.
+</p><p>
+When Milly had settled that the extent of her
+goodwill itself made her shy, she had found for the
+moment quite a sufficient key, and they were by that
+time thoroughly afloat together. This might well
+have been the happiest hour they were to know, attacking
+in friendly independence their great London&mdash;the
+London of shops and streets and suburbs oddly
+interesting to Milly, as well as of museums, monuments,
+"sights" oddly unfamiliar to Kate, while
+their elders pursued a separate course, both rejoicing
+in their intimacy and each thinking the other's young
+woman a great acquisition for her own. Milly expressed
+to Susan Shepherd more than once that Kate
+had some secret, some smothered trouble, besides all
+the rest of her history; and that if she had so good-naturedly
+helped Mrs. Lowder to meet them this was
+exactly to create a diversion, to give herself something
+else to think about. But on the case thus postulated
+our young American had as yet had no light:
+she only felt that when the light should come it
+would greatly deepen the colour; and she liked to
+think she was prepared for anything. What she
+already knew, moreover, was full to her vision, of
+English, of eccentric, of Thackerayan character,
+Kate Croy having gradually become not a little explicit
+on the subject of her situation, her past, her
+present, her general predicament, her small success,
+up to the present hour, in contenting at the same time
+her father, her sister, her aunt and herself. It was
+Milly's subtle guess, imparted to her Susie, that the
+girl had somebody else as well, as yet unnamed, to
+content, it being manifest that such a creature
+couldn't help having; a creature not perhaps, if one
+would, exactly formed to inspire passions, since that
+always implied a certain silliness, but essentially
+seen, by the admiring eye of friendship, under the
+clear shadow of some probably eminent male interest.
+The clear shadow, from whatever source projected,
+hung, at any rate, over Milly's companion the whole
+week, and Kate Croy's handsome face smiled out of
+it, under bland skylights, in the presence alike of old
+masters passive in their glory and of thoroughly new
+ones, the newest, who bristled restlessly with pins
+and brandished snipping shears.
+</p><p>
+It was meanwhile a pretty part of the intercourse
+of these young ladies that each thought the other
+more remarkable than herself&mdash;that each thought
+herself, or assured the other she did, a comparatively
+dusty object and the other a favourite of nature and
+of fortune. Kate was amused, amazed at the way
+her friend insisted on "taking" her, and Milly wondered
+if Kate were sincere in finding her the most
+extraordinary&mdash;quite apart from her being the most
+charming&mdash;person she had come across. They had
+talked, in long drives, and quantities of history had
+not been wanting&mdash;in the light of which Mrs. Lowder's
+niece might superficially seem to have had the
+best of the argument. Her visitor's American references,
+with their bewildering immensities, their confounding
+moneyed New York, their excitements of
+high pressure, their opportunities of wild freedom,
+their record of used-up relatives, parents, clever,
+eager, fair, slim brothers&mdash;these the most loved&mdash;all
+engaged, as well as successive superseded guardians,
+in a high extravagance of speculation and dissipation
+that had left this exquisite being her black dress, her
+white face and her vivid hair as the mere last broken
+link: such a picture quite threw into the shade
+the brief biography, however sketchily amplified,
+of a mere middle-class nobody in Bayswater. And
+though that indeed might be but a Bayswater way
+of putting it, in addition to which Milly was in the
+stage of interest in Bayswater ways, this critic so
+far prevailed that, like Mrs. Stringham herself, she
+fairly got her companion to accept from her that
+she was quite the nearest approach to a practical
+princess Bayswater could hope ever to know. It
+was a fact&mdash;it became one at the end of three days&mdash;that
+Milly actually began to borrow from the handsome
+girl a sort of view of her state; the handsome
+girl's impression of it was clearly so sincere. This
+impression was a tribute, a tribute positively to
+power, power the source of which was the last thing
+Kate treated as a mystery. There were passages,
+under all their skylights, the succession of their shops
+being large, in which the latter's easy, yet the least
+bit dry manner sufficiently gave out that if she had
+had so deep a pocket&mdash;&mdash;!
+</p><p>
+It was not moreover by any means with not having
+the imagination of expenditure that she appeared
+to charge her friend, but with not having the imagination
+of terror, of thrift, the imagination or in any
+degree the habit of a conscious dependence on others.
+Such moments, when all Wigmore Street, for instance,
+seemed to rustle about and the pale girl herself
+to be facing the different rustlers, usually so
+undiscriminated, as individual Britons too, Britons
+personal, parties to a relation and perhaps even intrinsically
+remarkable&mdash;such moments in especial determined
+in Kate a perception of the high happiness
+of her companion's liberty. Milly's range was thus
+immense; she had to ask nobody for anything, to
+refer nothing to any one; her freedom, her fortune
+and her fancy were her law; an obsequious world
+surrounded her, she could sniff up at every step its
+fumes. And Kate, in these days, was altogether in
+the phase of forgiving her so much bliss; in the
+phase moreover of believing that, should they continue
+to go on together, she would abide in that generosity.
+She had, at such a point as this, no suspicion
+of a rift within the lute&mdash;by which we mean not
+only none of anything's coming between them, but
+none of any definite flaw in so much clearness of
+quality. Yet, all the same, if Milly, at Mrs. Lowder's
+banquet, had described herself to Lord Mark
+as kindly used by the young woman on the other side
+because of some faintly-felt special propriety in it,
+so there really did match with this, privately, on the
+young woman's part, a feeling not analysed but
+divided, a latent impression that Mildred Theale was
+not, after all, a person to change places, to change
+even chances with. Kate, verily, would perhaps not
+quite have known what she meant by this reservation,
+and she came near naming it only when she said
+to herself that, rich as Milly was, one probably
+wouldn't&mdash;which was singular&mdash;ever hate her for it.
+The handsome girl had, with herself, these felicities
+and crudities: it wasn't obscure to her that, without
+some very particular reason to help, it might have
+proved a test of one's philosophy not to be irritated
+by a mistress of millions, or whatever they were,
+who, as a girl, so easily might have been, like herself,
+only vague and fatally female. She was by no
+means sure of liking Aunt Maud as much as she deserved,
+and Aunt Maud's command of funds was
+obviously inferior to Milly's. There was thus
+clearly, as pleading for the latter, some influence that
+would later on become distinct; and meanwhile, decidedly,
+it was enough that she was as charming as
+she was queer and as queer as she was charming&mdash;all
+of which was a rare amusement; as well, for that
+matter, as further sufficient that there were objects
+of value she had already pressed on Kate's acceptance.
+A week of her society in these conditions&mdash;conditions
+that Milly chose to sum up as ministering
+immensely, for a blind, vague pilgrim, to aid and
+comfort&mdash;announced itself from an early hour as
+likely to become a week of presents, acknowledgments,
+mementos, pledges of gratitude and admiration
+that were all on one side. Kate as promptly
+embraced the propriety of making it clear that she
+must forswear shops till she should receive some
+guarantee that the contents of each one she entered
+as a humble companion should not be placed at her
+feet; yet that was in truth not before she had found
+herself in possession, under whatever protests, of
+several precious ornaments and other minor conveniences.
+</p><p>
+Great was the absurdity, too, that there should
+have come a day, by the end of the week, when it
+appeared that all Milly would have asked in definite
+"return," as might be said, was to be told a little
+about Lord Mark and to be promised the privilege
+of a visit to Mrs. Condrip. Far other amusements
+had been offered her, but her eagerness was shamelessly
+human, and she seemed really to count more
+on the revelation of the anxious lady of Chelsea than
+on the best nights of the opera. Kate admired, and
+showed it, such an absence of fear: to the fear of
+being bored, in such a connection, she would have
+been so obviously entitled. Milly's answer to this
+was the plea of her curiosities&mdash;which left her
+friend wondering as to their odd direction. Some
+among them, no doubt, were rather more intelligible,
+and Kate had heard without wonder that she was
+blank about Lord Mark. This young lady's account
+of him, at the same time, professed itself as frankly
+imperfect; for what they best knew him by at Lancaster
+Gate was a thing difficult to explain. One
+knew people in general by something they had to
+show, something that, either for them or against,
+could be touched or named or proved; and she could
+think of no other case of a value taken as so great
+and yet flourishing untested. His value was his
+future, which had somehow got itself as accepted
+by Aunt Maud as if it had been his good cook or his
+steam-launch. She, Kate, didn't mean she thought
+him a humbug; he might do great things&mdash;but they
+were all, as yet, so to speak, he had done. On the
+other hand it was of course something of an achievement,
+and not open to every one, to have got one's self
+taken so seriously by Aunt Maud. The best
+thing about him, doubtless, on the whole, was that
+Aunt Maud believed in him. She was often fantastic,
+but she knew a humbug, and&mdash;no, Lord Mark
+wasn't that. He had been a short time in the House,
+on the Tory side, but had lost his seat on the first
+opportunity, and this was all he had to point to.
+However, he pointed to nothing; which was very
+possibly just a sign of his real cleverness, one of
+those that the really clever had in common with the
+really void. Even Aunt Maud frequently admitted
+that there was a good deal, for her view of him, to
+come up in the rear. And he wasn't meanwhile
+himself indifferent&mdash;indifferent to himself&mdash;for
+he was working Lancaster Gate for all it was
+worth: just as it was, no doubt, working <i>him,</i>
+and just as the working and the worked were in
+London, as one might explain, the parties to every
+relation.
+</p><p>
+Kate did explain, for her listening friend: every
+one who had anything to give&mdash;it was true they were
+the fewest&mdash;made the sharpest possible bargain for
+it, got at least its value in return. The strangest
+thing, furthermore, was that this might be, in cases,
+a happy understanding. The worker in one connection
+was the worked in another; it was as broad as
+it was long&mdash;with the wheels of the system, as might
+be seen, wonderfully oiled. People could quite like
+each other in the midst of it, as Aunt Maud, by every
+appearance, quite liked Lord Mark, and as Lord
+Mark, it was to be hoped, liked Mrs. Lowder, since
+if he didn't he was a greater brute than one could believe.
+She, Kate, had not yet, it was true, made out
+what he was doing for her&mdash;besides which the dear
+woman needed him, even at the most he could do,
+much less than she imagined; so far as all of which
+went, moreover, there were plenty of things on every
+side she had not yet made out. She believed, on the
+whole, in any one Aunt Maud took up; and she gave
+it to Milly as worth thinking of that, whatever wonderful
+people this young lady might meet in the land,
+she would meet no more extraordinary woman.
+There were greater celebrities by the million, and of
+course greater swells, but a bigger <i>person,</i> by Kate's
+view, and a larger natural handful every way, would
+really be far to seek. When Milly inquired with interest
+if Kate's belief in <i>her</i> was primarily on the
+lines of what Mrs. Lowder "took up," her interlocutress
+could handsomely say yes, since by the same
+principle she believed in herself. Whom but Aunt
+Maud's niece, pre-eminently, had Aunt Maud taken
+up, and who was thus more in the current, with her,
+of working and of being worked? "You may ask,"
+Kate said, "what in the world I have to give; and
+that indeed is just what I'm trying to learn. There
+must be something, for her to think she can get it
+out of me. She <i>will</i> get it&mdash;trust her; and then I
+shall see what it is; which I beg you to believe I
+should never have found out for myself." She declined
+to treat any question of Milly's own "paying"
+power as discussable; that Milly would pay a
+hundred per cent.&mdash;and even to the end, doubtless,
+through the nose&mdash;was just the beautiful basis on
+which they found themselves.
+</p><p>
+These were fine facilities, pleasantries, ironies, all
+these luxuries of gossip and philosophies of London
+and of life, and they became quickly, between the
+pair, the common form of talk, Milly professing herself
+delighted to know that something was to be done
+with her. If the most remarkable woman in England
+was to do it, so much the better, and if the most
+remarkable woman in England had them both in
+hand together, why, what could be jollier for each?
+When she reflected indeed a little on the oddity of
+her wanting two at once, Kate had the natural reply
+that it was exactly what showed her sincerity. She
+invariably gave way to feeling, and feeling had distinctly
+popped up in her on the advent of her girlhood's
+friend. The way the cat would jump was
+always, in presence of anything that moved her, interesting
+to see; visibly enough, moreover, for a
+long time, it hadn't jumped anything like so far.
+This, in fact, as we already know, remained the marvel
+for Milly Theale, who, on sight of Mrs. Lowder,
+found fifty links in respect to Susie absent from the
+chain of association. She knew so herself what she
+thought of Susie that she would have expected the
+lady of Lancaster Gate to think something quite different;
+the failure of which endlessly mystified her.
+But her mystification was the cause for her of another
+fine impression, inasmuch as when she went
+so far as to observe to Kate that Susan Shepherd&mdash;and
+especially Susan Shepherd emerging so uninvited
+from an irrelevant past&mdash;ought, by all the proprieties,
+simply to have bored Aunt Maud, her confidant
+agreed with her without a protest and abounded
+in the sense of her wonder. Susan Shepherd at
+least bored the niece&mdash;that was plain; this young
+woman saw nothing in her&mdash;nothing to account for
+anything, not even for Milly's own indulgence:
+which little fact became in turn to the latter's mind
+a fact of significance. It was a light on the handsome
+girl&mdash;representing more than merely showed&mdash;that
+poor Susie was simply as nought to her. This
+was, in a manner too, a general admonition to poor
+Susie's companion, who seemed to see marked by it
+the direction in which she had best most look out.
+</p><p>
+It just faintly rankled in her that a person who was
+good enough and to spare for Milly Theale shouldn't
+be good enough for another girl; though, oddly
+enough, she could easily have forgiven Mrs. Lowder
+herself the impatience. Mrs. Lowder didn't feel it,
+and Kate Croy felt it with ease; yet in the end, be
+it added, she grasped the reason, and the reason enriched
+her mind. Wasn't it sufficiently the reason
+that the handsome girl was, with twenty other splendid
+qualities, the least bit brutal too, and didn't she
+suggest, as no one yet had ever done for her new
+friend, that there might be a wild beauty in that, and
+even a strange grace? Kate wasn't brutally brutal&mdash;which
+Milly had hitherto benightedly supposed
+the only way; she wasn't even aggressively so, but
+rather indifferently, defensively and, as might be
+said, by the habit of anticipation. She simplified in
+advance, was beforehand with her doubts, and knew
+with singular quickness what she wasn't, as they
+said in New York, going to like. In that way at
+least people were clearly quicker in England than at
+home; and Milly could quite see, after a little, how
+such instincts might become usual in a world in
+which dangers abounded. There were more dangers,
+clearly, round about Lancaster Gate than one
+suspected in New York or could dream of in Boston.
+At all events, with more sense of them, there were
+more precautions, and it was a remarkable world
+altogether in which there could be precautions, on
+whatever ground, against Susie.
+</p>
+<br>
+<h2 align="center">IX</h2>
+<br>
+<p>
+She certainly made up with Susie directly, however,
+for any allowance she might have had privately to
+extend to tepid appreciation; since the late and long
+talks of these two embraced not only everything
+offered and suggested by the hours they spent apart,
+but a good deal more besides. She might be as detached
+as the occasion required at four o'clock in the
+afternoon, but she used no such freedom to any one
+about anything as she habitually used about everything
+to Susan Shepherd at midnight. All the same,
+it should with much less delay than this have been
+mentioned, she had not yet&mdash;had not, that is, at the
+end of six days&mdash;produced any news for her comrade
+to compare with an announcement made her by the
+latter as a result of a drive with Mrs. Lowder, for a
+change, in the remarkable Battersea Park. The
+elder friends had sociably revolved there while the
+younger ones followed bolder fancies in the admirable
+equipage appointed to Milly at the hotel&mdash;a
+heavier, more emblazoned, more amusing chariot
+than she had ever, with "stables" notoriously mismanaged,
+known at home; whereby, in the course
+of the circuit, more than once repeated, it had "come
+out," as Mrs. Stringham said, that the couple at Lancaster
+Gate were, of all people, acquainted with Mildred's
+other English friend&mdash;the gentleman, the one
+connected with the English newspaper (Susie hung
+fire a little over his name) who had been with her
+in New York so shortly previous to present adventures.
+He had been named of course in Battersea
+Park&mdash;else he couldn't have been identified; and
+Susie had naturally, before she could produce her
+own share in the matter as a kind of confession, to
+make it plain that her allusion was to Mr. Merton
+Densher. This was because Milly had at first a little
+air of not knowing whom she meant; and the girl
+really kept, as well, a certain control of herself while
+she remarked that the case was surprising, the chance
+one in a thousand. They knew him, both Maud
+and Miss Croy knew him, she gathered too, rather
+well, though indeed it was not on any show of intimacy
+that he had happened to be mentioned. It had
+not been&mdash;Susie made the point&mdash;she herself who
+brought him in: he had in fact not been brought in
+at all, but only referred to as a young journalist
+known to Mrs. Lowder and who had lately gone to
+their wonderful country&mdash;Mrs. Lowder always said
+"your wonderful country"&mdash;on behalf of his journal.
+But Mrs. Stringham had taken it up&mdash;with the tips
+of her fingers indeed; and that was the confession:
+she had, without meaning any harm, recognised Mr.
+Densher as an acquaintance of Milly's, though she
+had also pulled herself up before getting in too far.
+Mrs. Lowder had been struck, clearly&mdash;it wasn't too
+much to say; then she also, it had rather seemed, had
+pulled herself up; and there had been a little moment
+during which each might have been keeping something
+from the other. "Only," said Milly's mate,
+"I luckily remembered in time that I had nothing
+whatever to keep&mdash;which was much simpler and
+nicer. I don't know what Maud has, but there it
+is. She was interested, distinctly, in your knowing
+him&mdash;in his having met you over there with so little
+loss of time. But I ventured to tell her it hadn't
+been so long as to make you as yet great friends.
+I don't know if I was right."
+</p><p>
+Whatever time this explanation might have taken,
+there had been moments enough in the matter now&mdash;before
+the elder woman's conscience had done itself
+justice&mdash;to enable Milly to reply that although the
+fact in question doubtless had its importance she
+imagined they wouldn't find the importance overwhelming.
+It <i>was</i> odd that their one Englishman
+should so instantly fit; it wasn't, however, miraculous&mdash;they
+surely all had often seen that, as every
+one said, the world was extraordinarily "small."
+Undoubtedly, too, Susie had done just the plain
+thing in not letting his name pass. Why in the
+world should there be a mystery?&mdash;and what an immense
+one they would appear to have made if he
+should come back and find they had concealed their
+knowledge of him! "I don't know, Susie dear,"
+the girl observed, "what you think I have to conceal."
+</p><p>
+"It doesn't matter, at a given moment," Mrs.
+Stringham returned, "what you know or don't know
+as to what I think; for you always find out the very
+next moment, and when you do find out, dearest,
+you never <i>really</i> care. Only," she presently asked,
+"have you heard of him from Miss Croy?"
+</p><p>
+"Heard of Mr. Densher? Never a word. We
+haven't mentioned him. Why should we?"
+</p><p>
+"That <i>you</i> haven't, I understand; but that she
+hasn't," Susie opined, "may mean something."
+</p><p>
+"May mean what?"
+</p><p>
+"Well," Mrs. Stringham presently brought out,
+"I tell you all when I tell you that Maud asks me to
+suggest to you that it may perhaps be better for the
+present not to speak of him: not to speak of him to
+her niece, that is, unless she herself speaks to you
+first. But Maud thinks she won't."
+</p><p>
+Milly was ready to engage for anything; but in
+respect to the facts&mdash;as they so far possessed them&mdash;it
+all sounded a little complicated. "Is it because
+there's anything between them?"
+</p><p>
+"No&mdash;I gather not; but Maud's state of mind is
+precautionary. She's afraid of something. Or perhaps
+it would be more correct to say she's afraid of
+everything."
+</p><p>
+"She's afraid, you mean," Milly asked, "of their&mdash;a&mdash;liking
+each other?"
+</p><p>
+Susie had an intense thought and then an effusion.
+"My dear child, we move in a labyrinth."
+</p><p>
+"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&mdash;in this for instance&mdash;there are
+not abysses. I want abysses."
+</p><p>
+Her friend looked at her&mdash;it was not unfrequently
+the case&mdash;a little harder than the surface of the occasion
+seemed to require; and another person present
+at such times might have wondered to what inner
+thought of her own the good lady was trying to fit
+the speech. It was too much her disposition, no
+doubt, to treat her young companion's words as
+symptoms of an imputed malady. It was none the
+less, however, her highest law to be light when the
+girl was light. She knew how to be quaint with
+the new quaintness&mdash;the great Boston gift; it
+had been, happily, her note in the magazines; and
+Maud Lowder, to whom it was new indeed and who
+had never heard anything remotely like it, quite cherished
+her, as a social resource, for it. It should not
+therefore fail her now; with it in fact one might
+face most things. "Ah, then let us hope we shall
+sound the depths&mdash;I'm prepared for the worst&mdash;of
+sorrow and sin! But she would like her niece&mdash;we're
+not ignorant of that, are we?&mdash;to marry Lord
+Mark. Hasn't she told you so?"
+</p><p>
+"Hasn't Mrs. Lowder told me?"
+</p><p>
+"No; hasn't Kate? It isn't, you know, that she
+doesn't know it."
+</p><p>
+Milly had, under her comrade's eyes, a minute of
+mute detachment. She had lived with Kate Croy
+for several days in a state of intimacy as deep as it
+had been sudden, and they had clearly, in talk, in
+many directions, proceeded to various extremities.
+Yet it now came over her as in a clear cold way that
+there was a possible account of their relations in
+which the quantity her new friend had told her might
+have figured as small, as smallest, beside the quantity
+she hadn't. She couldn't say, at any rate, whether
+or no she had made the point that her aunt designed
+her for Lord Mark: it had only sufficiently come
+out&mdash;which had been, moreover, eminently guessable&mdash;that
+she was involved in her aunt's designs.
+Somehow, for Milly, brush it over nervously as she
+might and with whatever simplifying hand, this
+abrupt extrusion of Mr. Densher altered all proportions,
+had an effect on all values. It was fantastic
+of her to let it make a difference that she couldn't
+in the least have defined&mdash;and she was at least, even
+during these instants, rather proud of being able to
+hide, on the spot, the difference it did make. Yet,
+all the same, the effect for her was, almost violently,
+of Mr. Densher's having been there&mdash;having been
+where she had stood till now in her simplicity&mdash;before
+her. It would have taken but another free moment
+to make her see abysses&mdash;since abysses were
+what she wanted&mdash;in the mere circumstance of his
+own silence, in New York, about his English friends.
+There had really been in New York little time for
+anything; but, had she liked, Milly could have made
+it out for herself that he had avoided the subject of
+Miss Croy, and that Miss Croy was yet a subject it
+could never be natural to avoid. It was to be added
+at the same time that even if his silence had been
+labyrinthe&mdash;which was absurd in view of all the
+other things too he couldn't possibly have spoken of&mdash;this
+was exactly what must suit her, since it fell
+under the head of the plea she had just uttered to
+Susie. These things, however, came and went, and
+it set itself up between the companions, for the occasion,
+in the oddest way, both that their happening all
+to know Mr. Densher&mdash;except indeed that Susie
+didn't, but probably would,&mdash;was a fact belonging,
+in a world of rushing about, to one of the common
+orders of chance; and yet further that it was amusing&mdash;oh,
+awfully amusing!&mdash;to be able fondly to
+hope that there was "something in" its having been
+left to crop up with such suddenness. There seemed
+somehow a possibility that the ground or, as it were,
+the air might, in a manner, have undergone some
+pleasing preparation; though the question of this
+possibility would probably, after all, have taken some
+threshing out. The truth, moreover&mdash;and there
+they were, already, our pair, talking about it, the
+"truth!"&mdash;had not in fact quite cropped out. This,
+obviously, in view of Mrs. Lowder's request to her
+old friend.
+</p><p>
+It was accordingly on Mrs. Lowder's recommendation
+that nothing should be said to Kate&mdash;it was
+on this rich attitude of Aunt Maud's that the idea
+of an interesting complication might best hope to
+perch; and when, in fact, after the colloquy we have
+reported Milly saw Kate again without mentioning
+any name, her silence succeeded in passing muster
+with her as the beginning of a new sort of fun. The
+sort was all the newer by reason of its containing a
+small element of anxiety: when she had gone in for
+fun before it had been with her hands a little more
+free. Yet it <i>was,</i> none the less, rather exciting to
+be conscious of a still sharper reason for interest in
+the handsome girl, as Kate continued, even now, pre-eminently
+to remain for her; and a reason&mdash;this was
+the great point&mdash;of which the young woman herself
+could have no suspicion. Twice over, thus, for two
+or three hours together, Milly found herself seeing
+Kate, quite fixing her in the light of the knowledge
+that it was a face on which Mr. Densher's eyes had
+more or less familiarly rested and which, by the same
+token, had looked, rather <i>more</i> beautifully than less,
+into his own. She pulled herself up indeed with the
+thought that it had inevitably looked, as beautifully
+as one would, into thousands of faces in which one
+might one's self never trace it; but just the odd result
+of the thought was to intensify for the girl that
+side of her friend which she had doubtless already
+been more prepared than she quite knew to think of
+as the "other," the not wholly calculable. It was
+fantastic, and Milly was aware of this; but the
+other side was what had, of a sudden, been turned
+straight towards her by the show of Mr. Densher's
+propinquity. She hadn't the excuse of knowing it
+for Kate's own, since nothing whatever as yet proved
+it particularly to be such. Never mind; it was with
+this other side now fully presented that Kate came
+and went, kissed her for greeting and for parting,
+talked, as usual, of everything but&mdash;as it had so
+abruptly become for Milly&mdash;<i>the</i> thing. Our young
+woman, it is true, would doubtless not have tasted
+so sharply a difference in this pair of occasions had
+she not been tasting so peculiarly her own possible
+betrayals. What happened was that afterwards, on
+separation, she wondered if the matter had not mainly
+been that she herself was so "other," so taken up
+with the unspoken; the strangest thing of all being,
+still subsequently, that when she asked herself how
+Kate could have failed to feel it she became conscious
+of being here on the edge of a great darkness. She
+should never know how Kate truly felt about anything
+such a one as Milly Theale should give her to
+feel. Kate would never&mdash;and not from ill-will, nor
+from duplicity, but from a sort of failure of common
+terms&mdash;reduce it to such a one's comprehension or
+put it within her convenience.
+</p><p>
+It was as such a one, therefore, that, for three or
+four days more, Milly watched Kate as just such
+another; and it was presently as such a one that she
+threw herself into their promised visit, at last
+achieved, to Chelsea, the quarter of the famous Carlyle,
+the field of exercise of his ghost, his votaries,
+and the residence of "poor Marian," so often referred
+to and actually a somewhat incongruous spirit
+there. With our young woman's first view of poor
+Marian everything gave way but the sense of how,
+in England, apparently, the social situation of sisters
+could be opposed, how common ground, for a place
+in the world, could quite fail them: a state of things
+sagely perceived to be involved in an hierarchical, an
+aristocratic order. Just whereabouts in the order
+Mrs. Lowder had established her niece was a question
+not wholly void, as yet, no doubt, of ambiguity&mdash;though
+Milly was withal sure Lord Mark could
+exactly have fixed the point if he would, fixing it at
+the same time for Aunt Maud herself; but it was
+clear that Mrs. Condrip was, as might have been said,
+in quite another geography. She would not, in
+short, have been to be found on the same social map,
+and it was as if her visitors had turned over page
+after page together before the final relief of their
+benevolent "Here!" The interval was bridged,
+of course, but the bridge, verily, was needed, and the
+impression left Milly to wonder whether, in the general
+connection, it were of bridges or of intervals
+that the spirit not locally disciplined would find itself
+most conscious. It was as if at home, by contrast,
+there were neither&mdash;neither the difference
+itself, from position to position, nor, on either side,
+and particularly on one, the awfully good manner,
+the conscious sinking of a consciousness, that made
+up for it. The conscious sinking, at all events, and
+the awfully good manner, the difference, the bridge,
+the interval, the skipped leaves of the social atlas&mdash;these,
+it was to be confessed, had a little, for our
+young lady, in default of stouter stuff, to work themselves
+into the light literary legend&mdash;a mixed, wandering
+echo of Trollope, of Thackeray, perhaps
+mostly of Dickens&mdash;under favour of which her pilgrimage
+had so much appealed. She could relate
+to Susie later on, late the same evening, that the
+legend, before she had done with it, had run clear,
+that the adored author of <i>The Newcomes</i>, in fine, had
+been on the whole the note: the picture lacking thus
+more than she had hoped, or rather perhaps showing
+less than she had feared, a certain possibility of Pickwickian
+outline. She explained how she meant by
+this that Mrs. Condrip had not altogether proved another
+Mrs. Nickleby, nor even&mdash;for she might have
+proved almost anything, from the way poor worried
+Kate had spoken&mdash;a widowed and aggravated Mrs.
+Micawber.
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Stringham, in the midnight conference, intimated
+rather yearningly that, however the event
+might have turned, the side of English life such experiences
+opened to Milly were just those she herself
+seemed "booked"&mdash;as they were all, roundabout
+her now, always saying&mdash;to miss: she had begun to
+have a little, for her fellow-observer, these moments
+of fanciful reaction&mdash;reaction in which she was once
+more all Susan Shepherd&mdash;against the high sphere
+of colder conventions into which her overwhelming
+connection with Maud Manningham had rapt her.
+Milly never lost sight, for long, of the Susan Shepherd
+side of her, and was always there to meet it
+when it came up and vaguely, tenderly, impatiently
+to pat it, abounding in the assurance that they would
+still provide for it. They had, however, to-night,
+another matter in hand; which proved to be presently,
+on the girl's part, in respect to her hour of
+Chelsea, the revelation that Mrs. Condrip, taking a
+few minutes when Kate was away with one of the
+children, in bed upstairs for some small complaint,
+had suddenly, without its being in the least "led up
+to," broken ground on the subject of Mr. Densher,
+mentioned him with impatience as a person in love
+with her sister. "She wished me, if I cared for
+Kate, to know," Milly said&mdash;"for it would be quite
+too dreadful, and one might do something."
+</p><p>
+Susie wondered. "Prevent anything coming of
+it? That's easily said. Do what?"
+</p><p>
+Milly had a dim smile. "I think that what she
+would like is that I should come a good deal to see
+her about it."
+</p><p>
+"And doesn't she suppose you've anything else
+to do?"
+</p><p>
+The girl had by this time clearly made it out.
+"Nothing but to admire and make much of her sister&mdash;whom
+she doesn't, however, herself in the least
+understand&mdash;and give up one's time, and everything
+else, to it." It struck the elder friend that she spoke
+with an almost unprecedented approach to sharpness;
+as if Mrs. Condrip had been rather specially
+disconcerting. Never yet so much as just of late
+had Mrs. Stringham seen her companion as exalted,
+and by the very play of something within, into a
+vague golden air that left irritation below. That
+was the great thing with Milly&mdash;it was her characteristic
+poetry; or at least it was Susan Shepherd's.
+"But she made a point," the former continued, "of
+my keeping what she says from Kate. I'm not to
+mention that she has spoken."
+</p><p>
+"And why," Mrs. Stringham presently asked, "is
+Mr. Densher so dreadful?"
+</p><p>
+Milly had, she thought, an hesitation&mdash;something
+that suggested a fuller talk with Mrs. Condrip than
+she inclined perhaps to report. "It isn't so much
+he himself." Then the girl spoke a little as for the
+romance of it; one could never tell, with her, where
+romance would come in. "It's the state of his
+fortunes."
+</p><p>
+"And is that very bad?"
+</p><p>
+"He has no 'private means,' and no prospect of
+any. He has no income, and no ability, according
+to Mrs. Condrip, to make one. He's as poor, she
+calls it, as 'poverty,' and she says she knows what
+that is."
+</p><p>
+Again Mrs. Stringham considered, and it presently
+produced something. "But isn't he brilliantly
+clever?"
+</p><p>
+Milly had also then an instant that was not quite
+fruitless. "I haven't the least idea."
+</p><p>
+To which, for the time, Susie only answered
+"Oh!"&mdash;though by the end of a minute she had followed
+it with a slightly musing "I see"; and that in
+turn with: "It's quite what Maud Lowder thinks."
+</p><p>
+"That he'll never do anything?"
+</p><p>
+"No&mdash;quite the contrary: that he's exceptionally
+able."
+</p><p>
+"Oh yes; I know"&mdash;Milly had again, in reference
+to what her friend had already told her of this,
+her little tone of a moment before. "But Mrs. Condrip's
+own great point is that Aunt Maud herself
+won't hear of any such person. Mr. Densher, she
+holds that's the way, at any rate, it was explained
+to me&mdash;won't ever be either a public man or a rich
+man. If he were public she'd be willing, as I understand,
+to help him; if he were rich&mdash;without being
+anything else&mdash;she'd do her best to swallow him.
+As it is, she taboos him."
+</p><p>
+"In short," said Mrs. Stringham as with a private
+purpose, "she told you, the sister, all about it. But
+Mrs. Lowder likes him," she added.
+</p><p>
+"Mrs. Condrip didn't tell me that."
+</p><p>
+"Well, she does, all the same, my dear, extremely."
+</p><p>
+"Then there it is!" On which, with a drop and
+one of those sudden, slightly sighing surrenders to
+a vague reflux and a general fatigue that had recently
+more than once marked themselves for her companion,
+Milly turned away. Yet the matter was not
+left so, that night, between them, albeit neither perhaps
+could afterwards have said which had first
+come back to it. Milly's own nearest approach, at
+least, for a little, to doing so, was to remark that they
+appeared all&mdash;every one they saw&mdash;to think tremendously
+of money. This prompted in Susie a laugh,
+not untender, the innocent meaning of which was
+that it came, as a subject for indifference, money
+did, easier to some people than to others: she made
+the point in fairness, however, that you couldn't have
+told, by any too crude transparency of air, what
+place it held for Maud Manningham. She did
+her worldliness with grand proper silences&mdash;if it
+mightn't better be put perhaps that she did her detachment
+with grand occasional pushes. However
+Susie put it, in truth, she was really, in justice to herself,
+thinking of the difference, as favourites of fortune,
+between her old friend and her new. Aunt
+Maud sat somehow in the midst of her money,
+founded on it and surrounded by it, even if with a
+clever high manner about it, her manner of looking,
+hard and bright, as if it weren't there. Milly, about
+hers, had no manner at all&mdash;which was possibly,
+from a point of view, a fault: she was at any rate
+far away on the edge of it, and you hadn't, as might
+be said, in order to get at her nature, to traverse, by
+whatever avenue, any piece of her property. It was
+clear, on the other hand, that Mrs. Lowder was keeping
+her wealth as for purposes, imaginations, ambitions,
+that would figure as large, as honourably unselfish,
+on the day they should take effect. She
+would impose her will, but her will would be only
+that a person or two shouldn't lose a benefit by not
+submitting if they could be made to submit. To
+Milly, as so much younger, such far views couldn't
+be imputed: there was nobody she was supposable
+as interested for. It was too soon, since she wasn't
+interested for herself. Even the richest woman, at
+her age, lacked motive, and Milly's motive doubtless
+had plenty of time to arrive. She was meanwhile
+beautiful, simple, sublime without it&mdash;whether missing
+it and vaguely reaching out for it or not; and
+with it, for that matter, in the event, would really be
+these things just as much. Only then she might
+very well have, like Aunt Maud, a manner. Such
+were the connections, at all events, in which the colloquy
+of our two ladies freshly flickered up&mdash;in which
+it came round that the elder asked the younger if she
+had herself, in the afternoon, named Mr. Densher
+as an acquaintance.
+</p><p>
+"Oh no&mdash;I said nothing of having seen him. I
+remembered," the girl explained, "Mrs. Lowder's
+wish."
+</p><p>
+"But that," her friend observed after a moment,
+"was for silence to Kate."
+</p><p>
+"Yes&mdash;but Mrs. Condrip would immediately have
+told Kate."
+</p><p>
+"Why so?&mdash;since she must dislike to talk about
+him."
+</p><p>
+"Mrs. Condrip must?" Milly thought. "What
+she would like most is that her sister should be
+brought to think ill of him; and if anything she can
+tell her will help that&mdash;" But Milly dropped suddenly
+here, as if her companion would see.
+</p><p>
+Her companion's interest, however, was all for
+what she herself saw. "You mean she'll immediately
+speak?" Mrs. Stringham gathered that this
+was what Milly meant, but it left still a question.
+"How will it be against him that you know him?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh, I don't know. It won't be so much one's
+knowing him as one's having kept it out of sight."
+</p><p>
+"Ah," said Mrs. Stringham, as if for comfort,
+<i>"you</i> haven't kept it out of sight. Isn't it much
+rather Miss Croy herself who has?"
+</p><p>
+"It isn't my acquaintance with him," Milly smiled,
+"that she has dissimulated."
+</p><p>
+"She has dissimulated only her own? Well then,
+the responsibility's hers."
+</p><p>
+"Ah but," said the girl, not perhaps with marked
+consequence, "she has a right to do as she likes."
+</p><p>
+"Then so, my dear, have you!" smiled Susan
+Shepherd.
+</p><p>
+Milly looked at her as if she were almost venerably
+simple, but also as if this were what one loved her
+for. "We're not quarrelling about it, Kate and I,
+<i>yet."</i>
+</p><p>
+"I only meant," Mrs. Stringham explained, "that
+I don't see what Mrs. Condrip would gain."
+</p><p>
+"By her being able to tell Kate?" Milly thought.
+"I only meant that I don't see what I myself should
+gain."
+</p><p>
+"But it will have to come out&mdash;that he knows you
+both&mdash;some time."
+</p><p>
+Milly scarce assented. "Do you mean when he
+comes back?"
+</p><p>
+"He'll find you both here, and he can hardly be
+looked to, I take it, to 'cut' either of you for the
+sake of the other."
+</p><p>
+This placed the question at last on a basis more
+distinctly cheerful. "I might get at him somehow
+beforehand," the girl suggested; "I might give him
+what they call here the tip&mdash;that he's not to know
+me when we meet. Or, better still, I mightn't be
+here at all."
+</p><p>
+"Do you want to run away from him?"
+</p><p>
+It was, oddly enough, an idea Milly seemed half
+to accept. "I don't know <i>what</i> I want to run away
+from!"
+</p><p>
+It dispelled, on the spot&mdash;something, to the elder
+woman's ear, in the sad, sweet sound of it&mdash;any
+ghost of any need of explaining. The sense was
+constant for her that their relation was as if afloat,
+like some island of the south, in a great warm sea
+that made, for every conceivable chance, a margin,
+an outer sphere of general emotion; and the effect
+of the occurrence of anything in particular was to
+make the sea submerge the island, the margin flood
+the text. The great wave now for a moment swept
+over. "I'll go anywhere else in the world you
+like."
+</p><p>
+But Milly came up through it. "Dear old Susie&mdash;how
+I do work you!"
+</p><p>
+"Oh, this is nothing yet."
+</p><p>
+"No indeed&mdash;to what it will be."
+</p><p>
+"You're not&mdash;and it's vain to pretend," said dear
+old Susie, who had been taking her in, "as sound
+and strong as I insist on having you."
+</p><p>
+"Insist, insist&mdash;the more the better. But the day
+I <i>look</i> as sound and strong as that, you know," Milly
+went on&mdash;"on that day I shall be just sound and
+strong enough to take leave of you sweetly for ever.
+That's where one is," she continued thus agreeably
+to embroider, "when even one's <i>most</i> 'beaux moments'
+aren't such as to qualify, so far as appearance
+goes, for anything gayer than a handsome cemetery.
+Since I've lived all these years as if I were dead, I
+shall die, no doubt, as if I were alive&mdash;which will
+happen to be as you want me. So, you see," she
+wound up, "you'll never really know where I am.
+Except indeed when I'm gone; and then you'll only
+know where I'm not."
+</p><p>
+"I'd die <i>for</i> you," said Susan Shepherd after a
+moment.
+</p><p>
+"'Thanks awfully'! Then stay here for me."
+</p><p>
+"But we can't be in London for August, nor for
+many of all these next weeks."
+</p><p>
+"Then we'll go back."
+</p><p>
+Susie blenched. "Back to America?"
+</p><p>
+"No, abroad&mdash;to Switzerland, Italy, anywhere.
+I mean by your staying here for me," Milly pursued,
+"your staying with me wherever I may be,
+even though we may neither of us know at the time
+where it is. No," she insisted, "I <i>don't</i> know where
+I am, and you never will, and it doesn't matter&mdash;and
+I dare say it's quite true," she broke off, "that everything
+will have to come out." Her friend would
+have felt of her that she joked about it now, had not
+her scale from grave to gay been a thing of such
+unnamable shades that her contrasts were never
+sharp. She made up for failures of gravity by failures
+of mirth; if she hadn't, that is, been at times
+as earnest as might have been liked, so she was certain
+not to be at other times as easy as she would like
+herself. "I must face the music. It isn't, at any
+rate, its 'coming out,'" she added; "it's that Mrs.
+Condrip would put the fact before her to his injury."
+</p><p>
+Her companion wondered. "But how to <i>his?"</i>
+</p><p>
+"Why, if he pretends to love her&mdash;&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"And does he only 'pretend'?"
+</p><p>
+"I mean if, trusted by her in strange countries, he
+forgets her so far as to make up to other people."
+</p><p>
+The amendment, however, brought Susie in, as if
+with gaiety, for a comfortable end. "Did he make
+up, the false creature, to <i>you?"</i>
+</p><p>
+"No&mdash;but the question isn't of that. It's of what
+Kate might be made to believe."
+</p><p>
+"That, given the fact that he evidently more or
+less followed up his acquaintance with you, to say
+nothing of your obvious weird charm, he must have
+been all ready if you had at all led him on?"
+</p><p>
+Milly neither accepted nor qualified this; she only
+said, after a moment, as with a conscious excess of
+the pensive: "No, I don't think she'd quite wish to
+suggest that I made up to <i>him;</i> for that I should have
+had to do so would only bring out his constancy. All
+I mean is," she added&mdash;and now at last, as with a
+supreme impatience "that her being able to make
+him out a little a person who could give cause for
+jealousy would evidently help her, since she's afraid
+of him, to do him in her sister's mind a useful ill
+turn."
+</p><p>
+Susan Shepherd perceived in this explanation such
+signs of an appetite for motive as would have sat
+gracefully even on one of her own New England
+heroines. It was seeing round several corners; but
+that was what New England heroines did, and it
+was moreover interesting for the moment to make
+out how many really her young friend had undertaken
+to see round. Finally, too, weren't they braving
+the deeps? They got their amusement where
+they could. "Isn't it only," she asked, "rather
+probable she'd see that Kate's knowing him as
+(what's the pretty old word?) <i>volage</i>&mdash;&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"Well?" She hadn't filled out her idea, but
+neither, it seemed, could Milly.
+</p><p>
+"Well, might but do what that often does&mdash;by all
+<i>our</i> blessed little laws and arrangements at least; excite
+Kate's own sentiment instead of depressing it."
+</p><p>
+The idea was bright, yet the girl but beautifully
+stared. "Kate's own sentiment? Oh, she didn't
+speak of that. I don't think," she added as if she
+had been unconsciously giving a wrong impression,
+"I don't think Mrs. Condrip imagines <i>she's</i> in love."
+</p><p>
+It made Mrs. Stringham stare in turn. "Then
+what's her fear?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, only the fact of Mr. Densher's possibly
+himself keeping it up&mdash;the fear of some final result
+from <i>that.</i>
+</p><p>
+"Oh," said Susie, intellectually a little disconcerted&mdash;"she
+looks far ahead!"
+</p><p>
+At this, however, Milly threw off another of her
+sudden vague "sports." "No&mdash;it's only we who
+do."
+</p><p>
+"Well, don't let us be more interested for them
+than they are for themselves!"
+</p><p>
+"Certainly not"&mdash;the girl promptly assented. A
+certain interest nevertheless remained; she appeared
+to wish to be clear. "It wasn't of anything on
+Kate's own part she spoke."
+</p><p>
+"You mean she thinks her sister does <i>not</i> care for
+him?"
+</p><p>
+It was still as if, for an instant, Milly had to be
+sure of what she meant; but there it presently was.
+"If she did care Mrs. Condrip would have told me."
+</p><p>
+What Susan Shepherd seemed hereupon for a little
+to wonder was why then they had been talking
+so. "But did you ask her?"
+</p><p>
+"Ah, no!"
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" said Susan Shepherd.
+</p><p>
+Milly, however, easily explained that she wouldn't
+have asked her for the world.
+</p>
+<br><br>
+<h2 align="center">BOOK FIFTH</h2>
+<br>
+<h2 align="center">X</h2>
+<p>
+Lord Mark looked at her to-day in particular
+as if to wring from her a confession
+that she had originally done him injustice;
+and he was entitled to whatever there might be
+in it of advantage or merit that his intention really
+in a manner took effect: he cared about something,
+that is, after all, sufficiently to make her
+feel absurdly as if she <i>were</i> confessing&mdash;all the
+while it was quite the case that neither justice
+nor injustice was what had been in question between
+them. He had presented himself at the hotel,
+had found her and had found Susan Shepherd at
+home, had been "civil" to Susan&mdash;it was just that
+shade, and Susan's fancy had fondly caught it; and
+then had come again and missed them, and then had
+come and found them once more: besides letting
+them easily see that if it hadn't by this time been the
+end of everything&mdash;which they could feel in the exhausted
+air, that of the season at its last gasp&mdash;the
+places they might have liked to go to were such as
+they would have had only to mention. Their feeling
+was&mdash;or at any rate their modest general plea&mdash;that
+there was no place they would have liked to go to;
+there was only the sense of finding they liked, wherever
+they were, the place to which they had been
+brought. Such was highly the case as to their current
+consciousness&mdash;which could be indeed, in an
+equally eminent degree, but a matter of course; impressions
+this afternoon having by a happy turn of
+their wheel been gathered for them into a splendid
+cluster, an offering like an armful of the rarest
+flowers. They were in presence of the offering&mdash;they
+had been led up to it; and if it had been still
+their habit to look at each other across distances for
+increase of unanimity his hand would have been silently
+named between them as the hand applied to the
+wheel. He had administered the touch that, under
+light analysis, made the difference&mdash;the difference of
+their not having lost, as Susie on the spot and at
+the hour phrased it again and again, both for herself
+and for such others as the question might concern,
+so beautiful and interesting an experience; the difference
+also, in fact, of Mrs. Lowder's not having
+lost it either, though it was with Mrs. Lowder, superficially,
+they had come, and though it was further
+with that lady that our young woman was directly
+engaged during the half-hour or so of her most
+agreeably inward response to the scene.
+</p><p>
+The great historic house had, for Milly, beyond
+terrace and garden, as the centre of an almost extravagantly
+grand Watteau-composition, a tone as
+of old gold kept "down" by the quality of the air,
+summer full-flushed, but attuned to the general perfect
+taste. Much, by her measure, for the previous
+hour, appeared, in connection with this revelation of
+it, to have happened to her&mdash;a quantity expressed in
+introductions of charming new people, in walks
+through halls of armour, of pictures, of cabinets, of
+tapestry, of tea-tables, in an assault of reminders
+that this largeness of style was the sign of <i>appointed</i>
+felicity. The largeness of style was the great containing
+vessel, while everything else, the pleasant
+personal affluence, the easy, murmurous welcome,
+the honoured age of illustrious host and hostess, all
+at once so distinguished and so plain, so public and
+so shy, became but this or that element of the infusion.
+The elements melted together and seasoned
+the draught, the essence of which might have struck
+the girl as distilled into the small cup of iced coffee
+she had vaguely accepted from somebody, while a
+fuller flood, somehow, kept bearing her up&mdash;all the
+freshness of response of her young life the freshness
+of the first and only prime. What had perhaps
+brought on just now a kind of climax was the fact
+of her appearing to make out, through Aunt Maud,
+what was really the matter. It couldn't be less than
+a climax for a poor shaky maiden to find it put to
+her of a sudden that she herself was the matter&mdash;for
+that was positively what, on Mrs. Lowder's part, it
+came to. Everything was great, of course, in great
+pictures, and it was doubtless precisely a part of the
+brilliant life&mdash;since the brilliant life, as one had faintly
+figured it, clearly <i>was</i> humanly led&mdash;that all impressions
+within its area partook of its brilliancy;
+still, letting that pass, it fairly stamped an hour as
+with the official seal for one to be able to take in so
+comfortably one's companion's broad blandness.
+"You must stay among us&mdash;you must stay; anything
+else is impossible and ridiculous; you don't
+know yet, no doubt&mdash;you can't; but you will soon
+enough: you can stay in <i>any</i> position." It had been
+as the murmurous consecration to follow the murmurous
+welcome; and even if it were but part of
+Aunt Maud's own spiritual ebriety&mdash;for the dear
+woman, one could see, was spiritually "keeping"
+the day&mdash;it served to Milly, then and afterwards, as
+a high-water mark of the imagination.
+</p><p>
+It was to be the end of the short parenthesis which
+had begun but the other day at Lancaster Gate with
+Lord Mark's informing her that she was a "success"&mdash;the
+key thus again struck; and though no
+distinct, no numbered revelations had crowded in,
+there had, as we have seen, been plenty of incident
+for the space and the time. There had been thrice
+as much, and all gratuitous and genial&mdash;if, in portions,
+not exactly hitherto <i>the</i> revelation&mdash;as three
+unprepared weeks could have been expected to produce.
+Mrs. Lowder had improvised a "rush" for
+them, but out of elements, as Milly was now a little
+more freely aware, somewhat roughly combined.
+Therefore if at this very instant she had her reasons
+for thinking of the parenthesis as about to close&mdash;reasons
+completely personal&mdash;she had on behalf of
+her companion a divination almost as deep. The
+parenthesis would close with this admirable picture,
+but the admirable picture still would show Aunt
+Maud as not absolutely sure either if she herself were
+destined to remain in it. What she was doing,
+Milly might even not have escaped seeming to see,
+was to talk herself into a sublimer serenity while she
+ostensibly talked Milly. It was fine, the girl fully
+felt, the way she did talk <i>her,</i> little as, at bottom, our
+young woman needed it or found other persuasions
+at fault. It was in particular during the minutes of
+her grateful absorption of iced coffee&mdash;qualified by
+a sharp doubt of her wisdom&mdash;that she most had in
+view Lord Mark's relation to her being there, or at
+least to the question of her being amused at it. It
+wouldn't have taken much by the end of five minutes
+quite to make her feel that this relation was charming.
+It might, once more, simply have been that
+everything, anything, was charming when one was so
+justly and completely charmed; but, frankly, she had
+not supposed anything so serenely sociable could define
+itself between them as the friendly understanding
+that was at present somehow in the air. They were,
+many of them together, near the marquee that had
+been erected on a stretch of sward as a temple of refreshment
+and that happened to have the property&mdash;which
+was all to the good of making Milly think
+of a "durbar"; her iced coffee had been a consequence
+of this connection, in which, further, the
+bright company scattered about fell thoroughly into
+place. Certain of its members might have represented
+the contingent of "native princes"&mdash;familiar,
+but scarce the less grandly gregarious term!&mdash;and
+Lord Mark would have done for one of these even
+though for choice he but presented himself as a
+supervisory friend of the family. The Lancaster
+Gate family, he clearly intended, in which he included
+its American recruits, and included above all Kate
+Croy&mdash;a young person blessedly easy to take care of.
+She knew people, and people knew her, and she was
+the handsomest thing there&mdash;this last a declaration
+made by Milly, in a sort of soft mid-summer madness,
+a straight skylark-flight of charity, to Aunt
+Maud.
+</p><p>
+Kate had, for her new friend's eyes, the extraordinary
+and attaching property of appearing at a given
+moment to show as a beautiful stranger, to cut her
+connections and lose her identity, letting the imagination
+for the time make what it would of them&mdash;make
+her merely a person striking from afar, more
+and more pleasing as one watched, but who was
+above all a subject for curiosity. Nothing could
+have given her, as a party to a relation, a greater
+freshness than this sense&mdash;which sprang up at its
+own hours&mdash;of being as curious about her as if one
+hadn't known her. It had sprung up, we have gathered,
+as soon as Milly had seen her after hearing
+from Mrs. Stringham of her knowledge of Merton
+Densher; she had <i>looked</i> then other and, as Milly
+knew the real critical mind would call it, more objective;
+and our young woman had foreseen it of
+her, on the spot, that she would often look so again.
+It was exactly what she was doing this afternoon;
+and Milly, who had amusements of thought that
+were like the secrecies of a little girl playing with
+dolls when conventionally "too big," could almost
+settle to the game of what one would suppose her,
+how one would place her, if one didn't know her.
+She became thus, intermittently, a figure conditioned
+only by the great facts of aspect, a figure to be waited
+for, named and fitted. This was doubtless but a
+way of feeling that it was of her essence to be peculiarly
+what the occasion, whatever it might be, demanded
+when its demand was highest. There were
+probably ways enough, on these lines, for such a consciousness;
+another of them would be, for instance,
+to say that she was made for great social uses. Milly
+was not wholly sure that she herself knew what great
+social uses might be&mdash;unless, as a good example,
+exerting just that sort of glamour in just that sort
+of frame were one of them: she would have fallen
+back on knowing sufficiently that they existed at all
+events for her friend. It imputed a primness, all
+round, to be reduced but to saying, by way of a translation
+of one's amusement, that she was always so
+<i>right</i>&mdash;since that, too often, was what the <i>insupportables</i>
+themselves were; yet it was, in overflow to
+Aunt Maud, what she had to content herself withal&mdash;save
+for the lame enhancement of saying she was
+lovely. It served, all the same, the purpose, strengthened
+the bond that for the time held the two ladies
+together, distilled in short its drop of rose-colour for
+Mrs. Lowder's own view. That was really the view
+Milly had, for most of the rest of the occasion, to
+give herself to immediately taking in; but it didn't
+prevent the continued play of those swift cross-lights,
+odd beguilements of the mind, at which we
+have already glanced.
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Lowder herself found it enough simply to
+reply, in respect to Kate, that she was indeed a luxury
+to take about the world: she expressed no
+more surprise than that at her "rightness" to-day.
+Wasn't it by this time sufficiently manifest that it
+was precisely as the very luxury she was proving
+that she had, from far back, been appraised and
+waited for? Crude elation, however, might be kept
+at bay, and the circumstance none the less demonstrated
+that they were all swimming together in the
+blue. It came back to Lord Mark again, as he
+seemed slowly to pass and repass and conveniently
+to linger before them; he was personally the note
+of the blue&mdash;like a suspended skein of silk within
+reach of the broiderer's hand. Aunt Maud's free-moving
+shuttle took a length of him at rhythmic intervals;
+and one of the intermixed truths that flickered
+across to Milly was that he ever so consentingly
+knew he was being worked in. This was almost like
+an understanding with her at Mrs. Lowder's expense,
+which she would have none of; she wouldn't
+for the world have had him make any such point as
+that he wouldn't have launched them at Matcham&mdash;or
+whatever it was he <i>had</i> done&mdash;only for Aunt
+Maud's <i>beaux yeux.</i> What he had done, it would
+have been guessable, was something he had for some
+time been desired in vain to do; and what they were
+all now profiting by was a change comparatively sudden,
+the cessation of hope delayed. What had
+caused the cessation easily showed itself as none of
+Milly's business; and she was luckily, for that matter,
+in no real danger of hearing from him directly
+that her individual weight had been felt in the scale.
+Why then indeed was it an effect of his diffused but
+subdued participation that he might absolutely have
+been saying to her "Yes, let the dear woman take
+her own tone? Since she's here she may stay," he
+might have been adding&mdash;"for whatever she can
+make of it. But you and I are different." Milly
+knew <i>she</i> was different in truth&mdash;his own difference
+was his own affair; but also she knew that, after all,
+even at their distinctest, Lord Mark's "tips" in this
+line would be tacit. He practically placed her&mdash;it
+came round again to that&mdash;under no obligation
+whatever. It was a matter of equal ease, moreover,
+her letting Mrs. Lowder take a tone. She might
+have taken twenty&mdash;they would have spoiled nothing.
+</p><p>
+"You must stay on with us; you <i>can,</i> you know,
+in any position you like; any, any, <i>any,</i> my dear
+child"&mdash;and her emphasis went deep. "You must
+make your home with us; and it's really open to you
+to make the most beautiful one in the world. You
+mustn't be under a mistake&mdash;under any of any sort;
+and you must let us all think for you a little, take
+care of you and watch over you. Above all you must
+help me with Kate, and you must stay a little <i>for</i>
+her; nothing for a long time has happened to me so
+good as that you and she should have become friends.
+It's beautiful; it's great; it's everything. What
+makes it perfect is that it should have come about
+through our dear delightful Susie, restored to me,
+after so many years, by such a miracle. No&mdash;that's
+more charming to me than even your hitting it off
+with Kate. God has been good to one&mdash;positively;
+for I couldn't, at my age, have made a new friend&mdash;undertaken,
+I mean, out of whole cloth, the real
+thing. It's like changing one's bankers&mdash;after fifty:
+one doesn't do that. That's why Susie has been
+kept for me, as you seem to keep people in your wonderful
+country, in lavender and pink paper&mdash;coming
+back at last as straight as out of a fairy-tale and with
+you as an attendant fairy." Milly hereupon replied
+appreciatively that such a description of herself made
+her feel as if pink paper were her dress and lavender
+its trimming; but Aunt Maud was not to be deterred
+by a weak joke from keeping it up. Her interlocutress
+could feel besides that she kept it up in perfect
+sincerity. She was somehow at this hour a very
+happy woman, and a part of her happiness might
+precisely have been that her affections and her views
+were moving as never before in concert. Unquestionably
+she loved Susie; but she also loved Kate
+and loved Lord Mark, loved their funny old host and
+hostess, loved every one within range, down to the
+very servant who came to receive Milly's empty iceplate&mdash;down,
+for that matter, to Milly herself, who
+was, while she talked, really conscious of the enveloping
+flap of a protective mantle, a shelter with the
+weight of an eastern carpet. An eastern carpet, for
+wishing-purposes of one's own, was a thing to be on
+rather than under; still, however, if the girl should
+fail of breath it wouldn't be, she could feel, by Mrs.
+Lowder's fault. One of the last things she was
+afterwards to recall of this was Aunt Maud's going
+on to say that she and Kate must stand together because
+together they could do anything. It was for
+Kate of course she was essentially planning; but the
+plan, enlarged and uplifted now, somehow required
+Milly's prosperity too for its full operation, just as
+Milly's prosperity at the same time involved Kate's.
+It was nebulous yet, it was slightly confused, but it
+was unmistakably free and genial, and it made our
+young woman understand things Kate had said of
+her aunt's possibilities as well as characterisations
+that had fallen from Susan Shepherd. One of the
+most frequent on the lips of the latter had been that
+dear Maud was a natural force.
+</p>
+<br>
+<h2 align="center">XI</h2>
+<br>
+<p>
+A prime reason, we must add, why sundry impressions
+were not to be fully present to the girl till later
+on was that they yielded at this stage, with an effect
+of sharp supersession, to a detached quarter of an
+hour&mdash;her only one&mdash;with Lord Mark. "Have you
+seen the picture in the house, the beautiful one that's
+so like you?"&mdash;he was asking that as he stood before
+her; having come up at last with his smooth
+intimation that any wire he had pulled and yet
+wanted not to remind her of wasn't quite a reason for
+his having no joy at all.
+</p><p>
+"I've been through rooms and I've seen pictures.
+But if I'm 'like' anything so beautiful as most of
+them seemed to me&mdash;&mdash;!" It needed in short for
+Milly some evidence, which he only wanted to supply.
+She was the image of the wonderful Bronzino,
+which she must have a look at on every ground.
+He had thus called her off and led her away; the
+more easily that the house within was above all what
+had already drawn round her its mystic circle.
+Their progress, meanwhile, was not of the straightest;
+it was an advance, without haste, through innumerable
+natural pauses and soft concussions, determined
+for the most part by the appearance before
+them of ladies and gentlemen, singly, in couples, in
+groups, who brought them to a stand with an inveterate
+"I say, Mark." What they said she never
+quite made out; it was their all so domestically knowing
+him, and his knowing them, that mainly struck
+her, while her impression, for the rest, was but of
+fellow-strollers more vaguely afloat than themselves,
+supernumeraries mostly a little battered, whether as
+jaunty males or as ostensibly elegant women. They
+might have been moving a good deal by a momentum
+that had begun far back, but they were still
+brave and personable, still warranted for continuance
+as long again, and they gave her, in especial
+collectively, a sense of pleasant voices, pleasanter
+than those of actors, of friendly, empty words and
+kind, lingering eyes. The lingering eyes looked her
+over, the lingering eyes were what went, in almost
+confessed simplicity, with the pointless "I say,
+Mark "; and what was really most sensible of all
+was that, as a pleasant matter of course, if she didn't
+mind, he seemed to suggest their letting people, poor
+dear things, have the benefit of her.
+</p><p>
+The odd part was that he made her herself believe,
+for amusement, in the benefit, measured by him in
+mere manner&mdash;for wonderful, of a truth, was, as a
+means of expression, his slightness of emphasis&mdash;that
+her present good-nature conferred. It was, as
+she could easily see, a mild common carnival of
+good-nature&mdash;a mass of London people together, of
+sorts and sorts, but who mainly knew each other and
+who, in their way, did, no doubt, confess to curiosity.
+It had gone round that she was there; questions
+about her would be passing; the easiest thing was
+to run the gauntlet with <i>him</i>&mdash;just as the easiest
+thing was in fact to trust him generally. Couldn't
+she know for herself, passively, how little harm they
+meant her?&mdash;to that extent that it made no difference
+whether or not he introduced them. The
+strangest thing of all for Milly was perhaps the uplifted
+assurance and indifference with which she
+could simply give back the particular bland stare that
+appeared in such cases to mark civilisation at its
+highest. It was so little her fault, this oddity of
+what had "gone round" about her, that to accept
+it without question might be as good a way as another
+of feeling life. It was inevitable to supply the
+probable description&mdash;that of the awfully rich young
+American who was so queer to behold, but nice, by
+all accounts, to know; and she had really but one
+instant of speculation as to fables or fantasies perchance
+originally launched. She asked herself once
+only if Susie could, inconceivably, have been blatant
+about her; for the question, on the spot, was really
+blown away for ever. She knew in fact on the spot
+and with sharpness just why she had "elected"
+Susan Shepherd: she had had from the first hour the
+conviction of her being precisely the person in the
+world least possibly a trumpeter. So it wasn't their
+fault, it wasn't their fault, and anything might happen
+that would, and everything now again melted
+together, and kind eyes were always kind eyes&mdash;if it
+were never to be worse than that! She got with her
+companion into the house; they brushed, beneficently,
+past all their accidents. The Bronzino was, it
+appeared, deep within, and the long afternoon light
+lingered for them on patches of old colour and waylaid
+them, as they went, in nooks and opening
+vistas.
+</p><p>
+It was all the while for Milly as if Lord Mark had
+really had something other than this spoken pretext
+in view; as if there were something he wanted to say
+to her and were only&mdash;consciously yet not awkwardly,
+just delicately&mdash;hanging fire. At the same time
+it was as if the thing had practically been said by the
+moment they came in sight of the picture; since
+what it appeared to amount to was "Do let a fellow
+who isn't a fool take care of you a little." The thing
+somehow, with the aid of the Bronzino, was done;
+it hadn't seemed to matter to her before if he were
+a fool or no; but now, just where they were, she
+liked his not being; and it was all moreover none
+the worse for coming back to something of the same
+sound as Mrs. Lowder's so recent reminder. She
+too wished to take care of her&mdash;and wasn't it, <i>à peu
+près,</i> what all the people with the kind eyes were
+wishing? Once more things melted together&mdash;the
+beauty and the history and the facility and the splendid
+midsummer glow: it was a sort of magnificent
+maximum, the pink dawn of an apotheosis, coming
+so curiously soon. What in fact befell was that, as
+she afterwards made out, it was Lord Mark who said
+nothing in particular&mdash;it was she herself who said
+all. She couldn't help that&mdash;it came; and the reason
+it came was that she found herself, for the first moment,
+looking at the mysterious portrait through
+tears. Perhaps it was her tears that made it just
+then so strange and fair&mdash;as wonderful as he had
+said: the face of a young woman, all magnificently
+drawn, down to the hands, and magnificently
+dressed; a face almost livid in hue, yet handsome in
+sadness and crowned with a mass of hair rolled back
+and high, that must, before fading with time, have
+had a family resemblance to her own. The lady in
+question, at all events, with her slightly Michaelangelesque
+squareness, her eyes of other days, her
+full lips, her long neck, her recorded jewels, her brocaded
+and wasted reds, was a very great personage&mdash;only
+unaccompanied by a joy. 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."
+</p><p>
+He smiled for her at the portrait. "Than she?
+You'd scarce need to be better, for surely that's well
+enough. But you <i>are,</i> one feels, as it happens, better;
+because, splendid as she is, one doubts if she
+was good."
+</p><p>
+He hadn't understood. She was before the picture,
+but she had turned to him, and she didn't care
+if, for the minute, he noticed her tears. It was probably
+as good a moment as she should ever have with
+him. It was perhaps as good a moment as she
+should have with any one, or have in any connection
+whatever. "I mean that everything this afternoon
+has been too beautiful, and that perhaps everything
+together will never be so right again. I'm very glad
+therefore you've been a part of it."
+</p><p>
+Though he still didn't understand her he was as
+nice as if he had; he didn't ask for insistence, and
+that was just a part of his looking after her. He
+simply protected her now from herself, and there
+was a world of practice in it. "Oh, we must talk
+about these things!"
+</p><p>
+Ah, they had already done that, she knew, as much
+as she ever would; and she was shaking her head at
+her pale sister the next moment with a world, on her
+side, of slowness. "I wish I could see the resemblance.
+Of course her complexion's green," she
+laughed; "but mine's several shades greener."
+</p><p>
+"It's down to the very hands," said Lord Mark.
+</p><p>
+"Her hands are large," Milly went on, "but mine
+are larger. Mine are huge."
+</p><p>
+"Oh, you go her, all round, 'one better'&mdash;which
+is just what I said. But you're a pair. You must
+surely catch it," he added as if it were important to
+his character as a serious man not to appear to have
+invented his plea.
+</p><p>
+"I don't know one never knows one's self. It's
+a funny fancy, and I don't imagine it would have
+occurred&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"I see it <i>has</i> occurred"&mdash;he has already taken her
+up. She had her back, as she faced the picture, to
+one of the doors of the room, which was open, and
+on her turning, as he spoke, she saw that they were
+in the presence of three other persons, also, as appeared,
+interested inquirers. Kate Croy was one of
+these; Lord Mark had just become aware of her,
+and she, all arrested, had immediately seen, and made
+the best of it, that she was far from being first in
+the field. She had brought a lady and a gentleman
+to whom she wished to show what Lord Mark was
+showing Milly, and he took her straightway as a reinforcement.
+Kate herself had spoken, however,
+before he had had time to tell her so.
+</p><p>
+<i>"You</i> had noticed too?"&mdash;she smiled at him without
+looking at Milly. "Then I'm not original&mdash;which
+one always hopes one has been. But the likeness
+is so great." And now she looked at Milly&mdash;for
+whom again it was, all round indeed, kind, kind
+eyes. "Yes, there you are, my dear, if you want to
+know. And you're superb." She took now but a
+glance at the picture, though it was enough to make
+her question to her friends not too straight. "Isn't
+she superb?"
+</p><p>
+"I brought Miss Theale," Lord Mark explained
+to the latter, "quite off my own bat."
+</p><p>
+"I wanted Lady Aldershaw," Kate continued to
+Milly, "to see for herself."
+</p><p>
+<i>"Les grands esprits se rencontrent!"</i> laughed her
+attendant gentleman, a high, but slightly stooping,
+shambling and wavering person, who represented
+urbanity by the liberal aid of certain prominent front
+teeth and whom Milly vaguely took for some sort of
+great man.
+</p><p>
+Lady Aldershaw meanwhile looked at Milly quite
+as if Milly had been the Bronzino and the Bronzino
+only Milly. "Superb, superb. Of course I had
+noticed you. It is wonderful," she went on with her
+back to the picture, but with some other eagerness
+which Milly felt gathering, directing her motions
+now. It was enough&mdash;they were introduced, and
+she was saying "I wonder if you could give us the
+pleasure of coming&mdash;&mdash;" She was not fresh, for
+she was not young, even though she denied at every
+pore that she was old; but she was vivid and much
+bejewelled for the midsummer daylight; and she
+was all in the palest pinks and blues. She didn't
+think, at this pass, that she could "come" anywhere&mdash;Milly
+didn't; and she already knew that somehow
+Lord Mark was saving her from the question. He
+had interposed, taking the words out of the lady's
+mouth and not caring at all if the lady minded. That
+was clearly the right way to treat her&mdash;at least for
+him; as she had only dropped, smiling, and then
+turned away with him. She had been dealt with&mdash;it
+would have done an enemy good. The gentleman
+still stood, a little helpless, addressing himself to the
+intention of urbanity as if it were a large loud
+whistle; he had been signing sympathy, in his way,
+while the lady made her overture; and Milly had,
+in this light, soon arrived at their identity. They
+were Lord and Lady Aldershaw, and the wife was
+the clever one. A minute or two later the situation
+had changed, and she knew it afterwards to have
+been by the subtle operation of Kate. She was herself
+saying that she was afraid she must go now if
+Susie could be found; but she was sitting down on
+the nearest seat to say it. The prospect, through
+opened doors, stretched before her into other rooms,
+down the vista of which Lord Mark was strolling
+with Lady Aldershaw, who, close to him and much
+intent, seemed to show from behind as peculiarly
+expert. Lord Aldershaw, for his part, had been left
+in the middle of the room, while Kate, with her back
+to him, was standing before her with much sweetness
+of manner. The sweetness was all for <i>her;</i> she had
+the sense of the poor gentleman's having somehow
+been handled as Lord Mark had handled his wife.
+He dangled there, he shambled a little; then he bethought
+himself of the Bronzino, before which, with
+his eyeglass, he hovered. It drew from him an odd,
+vague sound, not wholly distinct from a grunt, and
+a "Humph&mdash;most remarkable!" which lighted
+Kate's face with amusement. The next moment he
+had creaked away, over polished floors, after the
+others, and Milly was feeling as if <i>she</i> had been rude.
+But Lord Aldershaw was in every way a detail, and
+Kate was saying to her that she hoped she wasn't
+ill.
+</p><p>
+Thus it was that, aloft there in the great gilded
+historic chamber and the presence of the pale personage
+on the wall, whose eyes all the while seemed
+engaged with her own, she found herself suddenly
+sunk in something quite intimate and humble and to
+which these grandeurs were strange enough witnesses.
+It had come up, in the form in which she
+had had to accept it, all suddenly, and nothing about
+it, at the same time, was more marked than that she
+had in a manner plunged into it to escape from something
+else. Something else, from her first vision of
+her friend's appearance three minutes before, had
+been present to her even through the call made by
+the others on her attention; something that was perversely
+<i>there,</i> she was more and more uncomfortably
+finding, at least for the first moments and by some
+spring of its own, with every renewal of their meeting.
+"Is it the way she looks to <i>him?"</i> she asked
+herself&mdash;the perversity being that she kept in remembrance
+that Kate was known to him. It wasn't
+a fault in Kate&mdash;nor in him assuredly; and she had
+a horror, being generous and tender, of treating
+either of them as if it had been. To Densher himself
+she couldn't make it up&mdash;he was too far away;
+but her secondary impulse was to make it up to Kate.
+She did so now with a strange soft energy&mdash;the impulse
+immediately acting. "Will you render me
+to-morrow a great service?"
+</p><p>
+"Any service, dear child, in the world."
+</p><p>
+"But it's a secret one&mdash;nobody must know. I
+must be wicked and false about it."
+</p><p>
+"Then I'm your woman," Kate smiled, "for
+that's the kind of thing I love. <i>Do</i> let us do something
+bad. You're impossibly without sin, you
+know."
+</p><p>
+Milly's eyes, on this, remained a little with their
+companion's. "Ah, I shan't perhaps come up to
+your idea. It's only to deceive Susan Shepherd."
+</p><p>
+"Oh!" said Kate as if this were indeed mild.
+</p><p>
+"But thoroughly&mdash;as thoroughly as I can."
+</p><p>
+"And for cheating," Kate asked, "my powers
+will contribute? Well, I'll do my best for you." In
+accordance with which it was presently settled between
+them that Milly should have the aid and comfort
+of her presence for a visit to Sir Luke Strett.
+Kate had needed a minute for enlightenment, and it
+was quite grand for her comrade that this name
+should have said nothing to her. To Milly herself
+it had for some days been secretly saying much. The
+personage in question was, as she explained, the
+greatest of medical lights if she had got hold, as
+she believed (and she had used to this end the wisdom
+of the serpent) of the right, the special man.
+She had written to him three days before, and he
+had named her an hour, eleven-twenty; only it had
+come to her, on the eve, that she couldn't go alone.
+Her maid, on the other hand, wasn't good enough,
+and Susie was too good. Kate had listened, above
+all, with high indulgence. "And I'm betwixt and
+between, happy thought! Too good for what?"
+</p><p>
+Milly thought. "Why, to be worried if it's nothing.
+And to be still more worried&mdash;I mean before
+she need be&mdash;if it isn't."
+</p><p>
+Kate fixed her with deep eyes. "What in the
+world is the matter with you?" It had inevitably
+a sound of impatience, as if it had been a challenge
+really to produce something; so that Milly felt her
+for the moment only as a much older person, standing
+above her a little, doubting the imagined ailments,
+suspecting the easy complaints, of ignorant
+youth. It somewhat checked her, further, that the
+matter with her was what exactly as yet she wanted
+knowledge about; and she immediately declared, for
+conciliation, that if she were merely fanciful Kate
+would see her put to shame. Kate vividly uttered,
+in return, the hope that, since she could come out and
+be so charming, could so universally dazzle and interest,
+she wasn't all the while in distress or in anxiety&mdash;didn't
+believe herself, in short, to be in any
+degree seriously menaced. "Well, I want to make
+out&mdash;to make out!" was all that this consistently
+produced. To which Kate made clear answer:
+"Ah then, let us by all means!"
+</p><p>
+"I thought," Milly said, "you would like to help
+me. But I must ask you, please, for the promise
+of absolute silence."
+</p><p>
+"And how, if you <i>are</i> ill, can your friends remain
+in ignorance?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, if I am, it must of course finally come out.
+But I can go for a long time." Milly spoke with her
+eyes again on her painted sister's&mdash;almost as if under
+their suggestion. She still sat there before Kate, yet
+not without a light in her face. "That will be one
+of my advantages. I think I could die without its
+being noticed."
+</p><p>
+"You're an extraordinary young woman," her
+friend, visibly held by her, declared at last. "What
+a remarkable time to talk of such things!"
+</p><p>
+"Well, we won't talk, precisely"&mdash;Milly got herself
+together again. "I only wanted to make sure
+of you."
+</p><p>
+"Here in the midst of&mdash;&mdash;!" But Kate could
+only sigh for wonder&mdash;almost visibly too for
+pity.
+</p><p>
+It made a moment during which her companion
+waited on her word; partly as if from a yearning,
+shy but deep, to have her case put to her just as Kate
+was struck by it; partly as if the hint of pity were
+already giving a sense to her whimsical "shot," with
+Lord Mark, at Mrs. Lowder's first dinner. Exactly
+this&mdash;the handsome girl's compassionate manner,
+her friendly descent from her own strength&mdash;was
+what she had then foretold. She took Kate up as if
+positively for the deeper taste of it. "Here in the
+midst of what?"
+</p><p>
+"Of everything. There's nothing you can't have.
+There's nothing you can't do."
+</p><p>
+"So Mrs. Lowder tells me."
+</p><p>
+It just kept Kate's eyes fixed as possibly for more
+of that; then, however, without waiting, she went
+on. "We all adore you."
+</p><p>
+"You're wonderful&mdash;you dear things!" Milly
+laughed.
+</p><p>
+"No, it's <i>you."</i> And Kate seemed struck with
+the real interest of it. "In three weeks!"
+</p><p>
+Milly kept it up. "Never were people on such
+terms! All the more reason," she added, "that I
+shouldn't needlessly torment you."
+</p><p>
+"But me? what becomes of <i>me?"</i> said Kate.
+</p><p>
+"Well, you&mdash;" Milly thought&mdash;"if there's anything
+to bear, you'll bear it."
+</p><p>
+"But I <i>won't</i> bear it!" said Kate Croy.
+</p><p>
+"Oh yes, you will: all the same! You'll pity me
+awfully, but you'll help me very much. And I absolutely
+trust you. So there we are." There they
+were, then, since Kate had so to take it; but there,
+Milly felt, she herself in particular was; for it was
+just the point at which she had wished to arrive.
+She had wanted to prove to herself that she didn't
+horribly blame her friend for any reserve; and what
+better proof could there be than this quite special
+confidence? If she desired to show Kate that she
+really believed the latter liked her, how could she
+show it more than by asking her for help?
+</p>
+<br>
+<h2 align="center">XII</h2>
+<br>
+<p>
+What it really came to, on the morrow, this first
+time&mdash;the time Kate went with her&mdash;was that the
+great man had, a little, to excuse himself; had, by a
+rare accident&mdash;for he kept his consulting-hours in
+general rigorously free&mdash;but ten minutes to give her;
+ten mere minutes which he yet placed at her service
+in a manner that she admired even more than she
+could meet it: so crystal-clean the great empty cup
+of attention that he set between them on the table.
+He was presently to jump into his carriage, but he
+promptly made the point that he must see her again,
+see her within a day or two; and he named for her
+at once another hour&mdash;easing her off beautifully too
+even then in respect to her possibly failing of justice
+to her errand. The minutes affected her in fact as
+ebbing more swiftly than her little army of items
+could muster, and they would probably have gone
+without her doing much more than secure another
+hearing, had it not been for her sense, at the last,
+that she had gained above all an impression. The
+impression&mdash;all the sharp growth of the final few
+moments&mdash;was neither more nor less than that she
+might make, of a sudden, in quite another world,
+another straight friend, and a friend who would
+moreover be, wonderfully, the most appointed, the
+most thoroughly adjusted of the whole collection,
+inasmuch as he would somehow wear the character
+scientifically, ponderably, proveably&mdash;not just loosely
+and sociably. Literally, furthermore, it wouldn't
+really depend on herself, Sir Luke Strett's friendship,
+in the least; perhaps what made her most stammer
+and pant was its thus queerly coming over her
+that she might find she had interested him even beyond
+her intention, find she was in fact launched in
+some current that would lose itself in the sea of science.
+At the same time that she struggled, however,
+she also surrendered; there was a moment at which
+she almost dropped the form of stating, of explaining,
+and threw herself, without violence, only with
+a supreme pointless quaver that had turned, the next
+instant, to an intensity of interrogative stillness,
+upon his general goodwill. His large, settled face,
+though firm, was not, as she had thought at first,
+hard; he looked, in the oddest manner, to her fancy,
+half like a general and half like a bishop, and she
+was soon sure that, within some such handsome
+range, what it would show her would be what was
+good, what was best for her. She had established,
+in other words, in this time-saving way, a relation
+with it; and the relation was the special trophy that,
+for the hour, she bore off. It was like an absolute
+possession, a new resource altogether, something
+done up in the softest silk and tucked away under
+the arm of memory. She hadn't had it when she
+went in, and she had it when she came out; she had
+it there under her cloak, but dissimulated, invisibly
+carried, when smiling, smiling, she again faced Kate
+Croy. That young lady had of course awaited her
+in another room, where, as the great man was to absent
+himself, no one else was in attendance; and she
+rose for her with such a face of sympathy as might
+have graced the vestibule of a dentist. "Is it out?"
+she seemed to ask as if it had been a question of a
+tooth; and Milly indeed kept her in no suspense
+at all.
+</p><p>
+"He's a dear. I'm to come again."
+</p><p>
+"But what does he say?"
+</p><p>
+Milly was almost gay. "That I'm not to worry
+about anything in the world, and that if I'll be a good
+girl and do exactly what he tells me, he'll take care
+of me for ever and ever."
+</p><p>
+Kate wondered as if things scarce fitted. "But
+does he allow then that you're ill?"
+</p><p>
+"I don't know what he allows, and I don't care.
+I shall know, and whatever it is it will be enough.
+He knows all about me, and I like it. I don't hate
+it a bit."
+</p><p>
+Still, however, Kate stared. "But could he, in so
+few minutes, ask you enough&mdash;&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"He asked me scarcely anything&mdash;he doesn't
+need to do anything so stupid," Milly said. "He
+can tell. He knows," she repeated; "and when I
+go back&mdash;for he'll have thought me over a little&mdash;it
+will be all right."
+</p><p>
+Kate, after a moment, made the best of this.
+"Then when are we to come?"
+</p><p>
+It just pulled her friend up, for even while they
+talked&mdash;at least it was one of the reasons&mdash;she stood
+there suddenly, irrelevantly, in the light of her <i>other</i>
+identity, the identity she would have for Mr. Densher.
+This was always, from one instant to another,
+an incalculable light, which, though it might go off
+faster than it came on, necessarily disturbed. It
+sprang, with a perversity all its own, from the fact
+that, with the lapse of hours and days, the chances
+themselves that made for his being named continued
+so oddly to fail. There were twenty, there were
+fifty, but none of them turned up. This, in particular,
+was of course not a juncture at which the least
+of them would naturally be present; but it would
+make, none the less, Milly saw, another day practically
+all stamped with avoidance. She saw in a
+quick glimmer, and with it all Kate's unconsciousness;
+and then she shook off the obsession. But it
+had lasted long enough to qualify her response. No,
+she had shown Kate how she trusted her; and that,
+for loyalty, would somehow do. "Oh, dear thing,
+now that the ice is broken I shan't trouble <i>you</i> again."
+</p><p>
+"You'll come alone?"
+</p><p>
+"Without a scruple. Only I shall ask you, please,
+for your absolute discretion still."
+</p><p>
+Outside, before the door, on the wide pavement
+of the great square, they had to wait again while
+their carriage, which Milly had kept, completed a
+further turn of exercise, engaged in by the coachman
+for reasons of his own. The footman was there,
+and had indicated that he was making the circuit;
+so Kate went on while they stood. "But don't you
+ask a good deal, darling, in proportion to what you
+give?"
+</p><p>
+This pulled Milly up still shorter&mdash;so short in fact
+that she yielded as soon as she had taken it in. But
+she continued to smile. "I see. Then you <i>can</i>
+tell."
+</p><p>
+"I don't want to 'tell,'" said Kate. "I'll be as
+silent as the tomb if I can only have the truth from
+you. All I want is that you shouldn't keep from me
+how you find out that you really are."
+</p><p>
+"Well then, I won't, ever. But you see for yourself,"
+Milly went on, "how I really am. I'm satisfied.
+I'm happy."
+</p><p>
+Kate looked at her long. "I believe you like it.
+The way things turn out for you&mdash;&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+Milly met her look now without a thought of anything
+but the spoken. She had ceased to be Mr.
+Densher's image; she was all her own memento
+and she was none the less fine. Still, still, what had
+passed was a fair bargain, and it would do. "Of
+course I like it. I feel&mdash;I can't otherwise describe
+it&mdash;as if I had been, on my knees, to the priest. I've
+confessed and I've been absolved. It has been lifted
+off."
+</p><p>
+Kate's eyes never quitted her. "He must have
+liked <i>you."</i>
+</p><p>
+"Oh&mdash;doctors!" Milly said. "But I hope," she
+added, "he didn't like me too much." Then as if
+to escape a little from her friend's deeper sounding,
+or as impatient for the carriage, not yet in sight, her
+eyes, turning away, took in the great stale square.
+As its staleness, however, was but that of London
+fairly fatigued, the late hot London with its dance
+all danced and its story all told, the air seemed a
+thing of blurred pictures and mixed echoes, and an
+impression met the sense&mdash;an impression that broke,
+the next moment, through the girl's tightened lips.
+"Oh, it's a beautiful big world, and everyone, yes,
+everyone&mdash;&mdash;!" It presently brought her back to
+Kate, and she hoped she didn't actually look as much
+as if she were crying as she must have looked to
+Lord Mark among the portraits at Matcham.
+</p><p>
+Kate at all events understood. "Everyone wants
+to be so nice?"
+</p><p>
+"So nice," said the grateful Milly.
+</p><p>
+"Oh," Kate laughed, "we'll pull you through!
+And won't you now bring Mrs. Stringham?"
+</p><p>
+But Milly after an instant was again clear about
+that. "Not till I've seen him once more."
+</p><p>
+She was to have found this preference, two days
+later, abundantly justified; and yet when, in prompt
+accordance with what had passed between them, she
+reappeared before her distinguished friend&mdash;that
+character having, for him, in the interval, built itself
+up still higher&mdash;the first thing he asked her was
+whether she had been accompanied. She told him,
+on this, straightway, everything; completely free at
+present from her first embarrassment, disposed even&mdash;as
+she felt she might become&mdash;to undue volubility,
+and conscious moreover of no alarm from his thus
+perhaps wishing that she had not come alone. It
+was exactly as if, in the forty-eight hours that had
+passed, her acquaintance with him had somehow increased,
+and his own knowledge in particular received
+mysterious additions. They had been together,
+before, scarce ten minutes; but the relation,
+the one the ten minutes had so beautifully created,
+was there to take straight up: and this not, on his
+own part, from mere professional heartiness, mere
+bedside manner, which she would have disliked&mdash;much
+rather from a quiet, pleasant air in him of having
+positively asked about her, asked here and there
+and found out. Of course he couldn't in the least
+have asked, or have wanted to; there was no source
+of information to his hand, and he had really needed
+none: he had found out simply by his genius&mdash;and
+found out, she meant, literally everything. Now
+she knew not only that she didn't dislike this&mdash;the
+state of being found out about; but that, on the contrary,
+it was truly what she had come for, and that,
+for the time at least, it would give her something firm
+to stand on. She struck herself as aware, aware as
+she had never been, of really not having had from
+the beginning anything firm. It would be strange
+for the firmness to come, after all, from her learning
+in these agreeable conditions that she was in some
+way doomed; but above all it would prove how little
+she had hitherto had to hold her up. If she was now
+to be held up by the mere process&mdash;since that was
+perhaps on the cards&mdash;of being let down, this would
+only testify in turn to her queer little history. <i>That</i>
+sense of loosely rattling had been no process at all;
+and it was ridiculously true that her thus sitting there
+to see her life put into the scales represented her first
+approach to the taste of orderly living. Such was
+Milly's romantic version&mdash;that her life, especially by
+the fact of this second interview, <i>was</i> put into the
+scales; and just the best part of the relation established
+might have been, for that matter, that the
+great grave charming man knew, had known at once,
+that it was romantic, and in that measure allowed
+for it. Her only doubt, her only fear, was whether
+he perhaps wouldn't even take advantage of her being
+a little romantic to treat her as romantic altogether.
+This doubtless was her danger with him;
+but she should see, and dangers in general meanwhile
+dropped and dropped.
+</p><p>
+The very place, at the end of a few minutes, the
+commodious, "handsome" room, far back in the fine
+old house, soundless from position, somewhat sallow
+with years of celebrity, somewhat sombre even at
+midsummer&mdash;the very place put on for her a look of
+custom and use, squared itself solidly round her as
+with promises and certainties. She had come forth
+to see the world, and this then was to be the world's
+light, the rich dusk of a London "back," these the
+world's walls, those the world's curtains and carpet.
+She should be intimate with the great bronze clock
+and mantel-ornaments, conspicuously presented in
+gratitude and long ago; she should be as one of the
+circle of eminent contemporaries, photographed,
+engraved, signatured, and in particular framed and
+glazed, who made up the rest of the decoration, and
+made up as well so much of the human comfort; and
+while she thought of all the clean truths, unfringed,
+unfingered, that the listening stillness, strained into
+pauses and waits, would again and again, for years,
+have kept distinct, she also wondered what she would
+eventually decide upon to present in gratitude. She
+would give something better at least than the brawny
+Victorian bronzes. This was precisely an instance
+of what she felt he knew of her before he had done
+with her: that she was secretly romancing at that
+rate, in the midst of so much else that was more
+urgent, all over the place. So much for her secrets
+with him, none of which really required to be
+phrased. It would have been, for example, a secret
+for her from any one else that without a dear lady
+she had picked up just before coming over she
+wouldn't have a decently near connection, of any
+sort, for such an appeal as she was making, to put
+forward: no one in the least, as it were, to produce
+for respectability. But <i>his</i> seeing it she didn't mind a
+scrap, and not a scrap either his knowing how she
+had left the dear lady in the dark. She had come
+alone, putting her friend off with a fraud: giving
+a pretext of shops, of a whim, of she didn't know
+what&mdash;the amusement of being for once in the
+streets by herself. The streets by herself were new
+to her&mdash;she had always had in them a companion, or
+a maid; and he was never to believe, moreover, that
+she couldn't take full in the face anything he might
+have to say. He was softly amused at her account
+of her courage; though he yet showed it somehow
+without soothing her too grossly. Still, he did want
+to know whom she had. Hadn't there been a lady
+with her on Wednesday?
+</p><p>
+"Yes&mdash;a different one. Not the one who's travelling
+with me. I've told <i>her."</i>
+</p><p>
+Distinctly he was amused, and it added to his air&mdash;the
+greatest charm of all&mdash;of giving her lots of
+time. "You've told her what?"
+</p><p>
+"Well," said Milly, "that I visit you in secret."
+</p><p>
+"And how many persons will she tell?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh, she's devoted. Not one."
+</p><p>
+"Well, if she's devoted doesn't that make another
+friend for you?"
+</p><p>
+It didn't take much computation, but she nevertheless
+had to think a moment, conscious as she was
+that he distinctly <i>would</i> want to fill out his notion
+of her&mdash;even a little, as it were, to warm the air for
+her. That, however&mdash;and better early than late&mdash;he
+must accept as of no use; and she herself felt for
+an instant quite a competent certainty on the subject
+of any such warming. The air, for Milly Theale,
+was, from the very nature of the case, destined never
+to rid itself of a considerable chill. This she could
+tell him with authority, if she could tell him nothing
+else; and she seemed to see now, in short, that it
+would importantly simplify. "Yes, it makes another;
+but they all together wouldn't make&mdash;well,
+I don't know what to call it but the difference. I
+mean when one is&mdash;really alone. I've never seen
+anything like the kindness." She pulled up a minute
+while he waited&mdash;waited again as if with his reasons
+for letting her, for almost making her, talk. What
+she herself wanted was not, for the third time, to
+cry, as it were, in public. She <i>had</i> never seen anything
+like the kindness, and she wished to do it justice;
+but she knew what she was about, and justice
+was not wronged by her being able presently to stick
+to her point. "Only one's situation is what it is.
+It's me it concerns. The rest is delightful and useless.
+Nobody can really help. That's why I'm by
+myself to-day. I <i>want</i> to be&mdash;in spite of Miss Croy,
+who came with me last. If you can help, so much
+the better and also of course if one can, a little,
+one's self. Except for that&mdash;you and me doing our
+best&mdash;I like you to see me just as I am. Yes, I like
+it&mdash;and I don't exaggerate. Shouldn't one, at the
+start, show the worst&mdash;so that anything after that
+may be better? It wouldn't make any real difference&mdash;it
+<i>won't</i> make any, anything that may happen
+won't&mdash;to any one. Therefore I feel myself, this
+way, with you, just as I am; and&mdash;if you do in the
+least care to know&mdash;it quite positively bears me up."
+She put it as to his caring to know, because his
+manner seemed to give her all her chance, and the
+impression was there for her to take. It was strange
+and deep for her, this impression, and she did, accordingly,
+take it straight home. It showed him&mdash;showed
+him in spite of himself&mdash;as allowing, somewhere
+far within, things comparatively remote,
+things in fact quite, as she would have said, outside,
+delicately to weigh with him; showed him as interested,
+on her behalf, in other questions beside the
+question of what was the matter with her. She accepted
+such an interest as regular in the highest type
+of scientific mind&mdash;his <i>being</i> the even highest, magnificently
+because otherwise, obviously, it wouldn't
+be there; but she could at the same time take it as
+a direct source of light upon herself, even though
+that might present her a little as pretending to equal
+him. Wanting to know more about a patient than
+how a patient was constructed or deranged couldn't
+be, even on the part of the greatest of doctors, anything
+but some form or other of the desire to let
+the patient down easily. When that was the case
+the reason, in turn, could only be, too manifestly,
+pity; and when pity held up its tell-tale face like
+a head on a pike, in a French revolution, bobbing
+before a window, what was the inference but that
+the patient was bad? He might say what he would
+now&mdash;she would always have seen the head at the
+window; and in fact from this moment she only
+wanted him to say what he would. He might say
+it too with the greater ease to himself as there wasn't
+one of her divinations that&mdash;as her own&mdash;he would
+in any way put himself out for. Finally, if he was
+making her talk she <i>was</i> talking; and what it could,
+at any rate, come to for him was that she wasn't
+afraid. If he wanted to do the dearest thing in the
+world for her he would show her he believed she
+wasn't; which undertaking of hers&mdash;not to have
+misled him&mdash;was what she counted at the moment
+as her presumptuous little hint to him that she was
+as good as himself. It put forward the bold idea
+that he could really <i>be</i> misled; and there actually
+passed between them for some seconds a sign, a sign
+of the eyes only, that they knew together where they
+were. This made, in their brown old temple of
+truth, its momentary flicker; then what followed it
+was that he had her, all the same, in his pocket; and
+the whole thing wound up, for that consummation,
+with its kind dim smile. Such kindness was wonderful
+with such dimness; but brightness&mdash;that even
+of sharp steel&mdash;was of course for the other side of
+the business, and it would all come in for her in
+one way or another. "Do you mean," he asked,
+"that you've no relations at all?&mdash;not a parent, not
+a sister, not even a cousin nor an aunt?"
+</p><p>
+She shook her head as with the easy habit of an
+interviewed heroine or a freak of nature at a show.
+"Nobody whatever." But the last thing she had
+come for was to be dreary about it. "I'm a survivor&mdash;a
+survivor of a general wreck. You see,"
+she added, "how that's to be taken into account&mdash;that
+everyone else <i>has</i> gone. When I was ten years
+old there were, with my father and my mother, six
+of us. I'm all that's left. But they died," she
+went on, to be fair all round, "of different things.
+Still, there it is. And, as I told you before, I'm
+American. Not that I mean that makes me worse.
+However, you'll probably know what it makes
+me."
+</p><p>
+"Yes," he discreetly indulged her; "I know perfectly
+what it makes you. It makes you, to begin
+with, a capital case."
+</p><p>
+She sighed, though gratefully, as if again before
+the social scene. "Ah, there you are!"
+</p><p>
+"Oh, no; there 'we' aren't at all. There I am only&mdash;but
+as much as you like. I've no end of American
+friends: there <i>they</i> are, if you please, and it's a fact
+that you couldn't very well be in a better place than
+in their company. It puts you with plenty of others&mdash;and
+that isn't pure solitude." Then he pursued:
+"I'm sure you've an excellent spirit; but don't try
+to bear more things than you need." Which after
+an instant he further explained. "Hard things have
+come to you in youth, but you mustn't think life will
+be for you all hard things. You've the right to be
+happy. You must make up your mind to it. You
+must accept any form in which happiness may
+come."
+</p><p>
+"Oh, I'll accept any whatever!" she almost gaily
+returned. "And it seems to me, for that matter,
+that I'm accepting a new one every day. Now
+<i>this!"</i> she smiled.
+</p><p>
+"This is very well so far as it goes. You can
+depend on me," the great man said, "for unlimited
+interest. But I'm only, after all, one element in
+fifty. We must gather in plenty of others. Don't
+mind who knows. Knows, I mean, that you and I
+are friends."
+</p><p>
+"Ah, you do want to see some one!" she broke
+out. "You want to get at some one who cares for
+me." With which, however, as he simply met this
+spontaneity in a manner to show that he had often
+had it from young persons of her race, and that he
+was familiar even with the possibilities of their
+familiarity, she felt her freedom rendered vain by
+his silence, and she immediately tried to think of the
+most reasonable thing she could say. This would
+be, precisely, on the subject of that freedom, which
+she now quickly spoke of as complete. "That's of
+course by itself a great boon; so please don't think
+I don't know it. I can do exactly what I like&mdash;anything
+in all the wide world. I haven't a creature to
+ask&mdash;there's not a finger to stop me. I can shake
+about till I'm black and blue. That perhaps isn't <i>all</i>
+joy; but lots of people, I know, would like to try it."
+He had appeared about to put a question, but then
+had let her go on, which she promptly did, for she
+understood him the next moment as having thus
+taken it from her that her means were as great as
+might be. She had simply given it to him so, and
+this was all that would ever pass between them on
+the odious head. Yet she couldn't help also knowing
+that an important effect, for his judgment, or
+at least for his amusement&mdash;which was his feeling,
+since, marvellously, he did have feeling&mdash;was produced
+by it. All her little pieces had now then fallen
+together for him like the morsels of coloured glass
+that used to make combinations, under the hand, in
+the depths of one of the polygonal peepshows of
+childhood. "So that if it's a question of my doing
+anything under the sun that will help&mdash;&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"You'll <i>do</i> anything under the sun? Good." He
+took that beautifully, ever so pleasantly, for what it
+was worth; but time was needed&mdash;ten minutes or
+so were needed on the spot&mdash;to deal even provisionally,
+with the substantive question. It was convenient,
+in its degree, that there was nothing she
+wouldn't do; but it seemed also highly and agreeably
+vague that she should have to do anything. They
+thus appeared to be taking her, together, for the moment,
+and almost for sociability, as prepared to proceed
+to gratuitous extremities; the upshot of which
+was in turn, that after much interrogation, auscultation,
+exploration, much noting of his own sequences
+and neglecting of hers, had duly kept up the vagueness,
+they might have struck themselves, or may at
+least strike us, as coming back from an undeterred
+but useless voyage to the north pole. Milly was
+ready, under orders, for the north pole; which fact
+was doubtless what made a blinding anticlimax of her
+friend's actual abstention from orders. "No," she
+heard him again distinctly repeat it, "I don't want
+you for the present to do anything at all; anything,
+that is, but obey a small prescription or two that
+will be made clear to you, and let me within a few
+days come to see you at home."
+</p><p>
+It was at first heavenly. "Then you'll see Mrs.
+Stringham." But she didn't mind a bit now.
+</p><p>
+"Well, I shan't be afraid of Mrs. Stringham."
+And he said it once more as she asked once more:
+"Absolutely not; I 'send' you nowhere. England's
+all right&mdash;anywhere that's pleasant, convenient, decent,
+will be all right. You say you can do exactly
+as you like. Oblige me therefore by being so good
+as to do it. There's only one thing: you ought of
+course, now, as soon as I've seen you again, to get
+out of London."
+</p><p>
+Milly thought. "May I then go back to the continent?"
+</p><p>
+"By all means back to the continent. Do go back
+to the continent."
+</p><p>
+"Then how will you keep seeing me? But perhaps,"
+she quickly added, "you won't want to keep
+seeing me."
+</p><p>
+He had it all ready; he had really everything all
+ready. "I shall follow you up; though if you mean
+that I don't want you to keep seeing <i>me</i>&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"Well?" she asked.
+</p><p>
+It was only just here that he struck her the least
+bit as stumbling. "Well, see all you can. That's
+what it comes to. Worry about nothing. You <i>have</i>
+at least no worries. It's a great, rare chance."
+</p><p>
+She had got up, for she had had from him both
+that he would send her something and would advise
+her promptly of the date of his coming to her, by
+which she was virtually dismissed. Yet, for herself,
+one or two things kept her. "May I come back to
+England too?"
+</p><p>
+"Rather! Whenever you like. But always,
+when you do come, immediately let me know."
+</p><p>
+"Ah," said Milly, "it won't be a great going to
+and fro."
+</p><p>
+"Then if you'll stay with us, so much the better."
+</p><p>
+It touched her, the way he controlled his impatience
+of her; and the fact itself affected her as so
+precious that she yielded to the wish to get more
+from it. "So you don't think I'm out of my
+mind?"
+</p><p>
+"Perhaps that <i>is,"</i> he smiled, "all that's the
+matter."
+</p><p>
+She looked at him longer. "No, that's too good.
+Shall I, at any rate, suffer?"
+</p><p>
+"Not a bit."
+</p><p>
+"And yet then live?"
+</p><p>
+"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?"
+</p>
+<br>
+<h2 align="center">XIII</h2>
+<br>
+<p>
+She had gone out with these last words so in her
+ears that when once she was well away&mdash;back this
+time in the great square alone&mdash;it was as if some
+instant application of them had opened out there before
+her. It was positively, this effect, an excitement
+that carried her on; she went forward into
+space under the sense of an impulse received&mdash;an
+impulse simple and direct, easy above all to act upon.
+She was borne up for the hour, and now she knew
+why she had wanted to come by herself. No one
+in the world could have sufficiently entered into her
+state; no tie would have been close enough to enable
+a companion to walk beside her without some disparity.
+She literally felt, in this first flush, that her
+only company must be the human race at large,
+present all round her, but inspiringly impersonal,
+and that her only field must be, then and there, the
+grey immensity of London. Grey immensity had
+somehow of a sudden become her element; grey immensity
+was what her distinguished friend had, for
+the moment, furnished her world with and what the
+question of "living," as he put it to her, living by
+option, by volition, inevitably took on for its immediate
+face. She went straight before her, without
+weakness, altogether with strength; and still as she
+went she was more glad to be alone, for nobody&mdash;not
+Kate Croy, not Susan Shepherd either&mdash;would
+have wished to rush with her as she rushed. She
+had asked him at the last whether, being on foot,
+she might go home so, or elsewhere, and he had replied
+as if almost amused again at her extravagance:
+"You're active, luckily, by nature&mdash;it's beautiful:
+therefore rejoice in it. <i>Be</i> active, without folly&mdash;for
+you're not foolish: be as active as you can and
+as you like." That had been in fact the final push,
+as well as the touch that most made a mixture of
+her consciousness&mdash;a strange mixture that tasted at
+one and the same time of what she had lost and what
+had been given her. It was wonderful to her, while
+she took her random course, that these quantities felt
+so equal: she had been treated&mdash;hadn't she?&mdash;as if
+it were in her power to live; and yet one wasn't
+treated so&mdash;was one?&mdash;unless it came up, quite as
+much, that one might die. The beauty of the bloom
+had gone from the small old sense of safety&mdash;that
+was distinct: she had left it behind her there forever.
+But the beauty of the idea of a great adventure, a big
+dim experiment or struggle in which she might,
+more responsibly than ever before, take a hand, had
+been offered her instead. It was as if she had had to
+pluck off her breast, to throw away, some friendly
+ornament, a familiar flower, a little old jewel, that
+was part of her daily dress; and to take up and
+shoulder as a substitute some queer defensive
+weapon, a musket, a spear, a battle-axe conducive
+possibly in a higher degree to a striking appearance,
+but demanding all the effort of the military posture.
+She felt this instrument, for that matter, already
+on her back, so that she proceeded now in very truth
+as a soldier on a march&mdash;proceeded as if, for her
+initiation, the first charge had been sounded. She
+passed along unknown streets, over dusty littery
+ways, between long rows of fronts not enhanced by
+the August light; she felt good for miles and only
+wanted to get lost; there were moments at corners,
+where she stopped and chose her direction, in which
+she quite lived up to his injunction to rejoice that she
+was active. It was like a new pleasure to have so
+new a reason; she would affirm, without delay, her
+option, her volition; taking this personal possession
+of what surrounded her was a fair affirmation to
+start with; and she really didn't care if she made
+it at the cost of alarms for Susie. Susie would wonder
+in due course "whatever," as they said at the
+hotel, had become of her; yet this would be nothing
+either, probably, to wonderments still in store.
+Wonderments in truth, Milly felt, even now attended
+her steps: it was quite as if she saw in people's eyes
+the reflection of her appearance and pace. She
+found herself moving at times in regions visibly not
+haunted by odd-looking girls from New York, duskily
+draped, sable-plumed, all but incongruously shod
+and gazing about them with extravagance; she
+might, from the curiosity she clearly excited in byways,
+in side-streets peopled with grimy children
+and costermongers carts, which she hoped were
+slums, literally have had her musket on her shoulder,
+have announced herself as freshly on the warpath.
+But for the fear of overdoing this character she
+would here and there have begun conversation, have
+asked her way; in spite of the fact that, as that
+would help the requirements of adventure, her way
+was exactly what she wanted not to know. The
+difficulty was that she at last accidentally found it;
+she had come out, she presently saw, at the Regent's
+Park, round which, on two or three occasions with
+Kate Croy, her public chariot had solemnly rolled.
+But she went into it further now; this was the real
+thing; the real thing was to be quite away from the
+pompous roads, well within the centre and on the
+stretches of shabby grass. Here were benches and
+smutty sheep; here were idle lads at games of ball,
+with their cries mild in the thick air; here were wanderers,
+anxious and tired like herself; here doubtless
+were hundreds of others just in the same box.
+Their box, their great common anxiety, what was it,
+in this grim breathing-space, but the practical question
+of life? They could live if they would; that
+is, like herself, they had been told so; she saw them
+all about her, on seats, digesting the information,
+feeling it altered, assimilated, recognising it again
+as something, in a slightly different shape, familiar
+enough, the blessed old truth that they would live
+if they could. All she thus shared with them made
+her wish to sit in their company; which she so far
+did that she looked for a bench that was empty, eschewing
+a still emptier chair that she saw hard by
+and for which she would have paid, with superiority,
+a fee.
+</p><p>
+The last scrap of superiority had soon enough left
+her, if only because she before long knew herself for
+more tired than she had proposed. This and the
+charm, after a fashion, of the situation in itself made
+her linger and rest; there was a sort of spell in the
+sense that nobody in the world knew where she was.
+It was the first time in her life that this had happened;
+somebody, everybody appeared to have
+known before, at every instant of it, where she was;
+so that she was now suddenly able to put it to herself
+that that hadn't been a life. This present kind
+of thing therefore might be&mdash;which was where precisely
+her distinguished friend seemed to be wishing
+her to come out. He wished her also, it was true,
+not to make, as she was perhaps doing now, too much
+of her isolation; at the same time however as he
+clearly desired to deny her no decent source of interest.
+He was interested&mdash;she arrived at that&mdash;in
+her appealing to as many sources as possible; and it
+fairly filtered into her, as she sat and sat, that he was
+essentially propping her up. Had she been doing it
+herself she would have called it bolstering&mdash;the bolstering
+that was simply for the weak; and she
+thought and thought as she put together the proofs
+that it was as one of the weak he was treating her.
+It was of course as one of the weak that she had gone
+to him&mdash;but, oh, with how sneaking a hope that he
+might pronounce her, as to all indispensables, a veritable
+young lioness! What indeed she was really
+confronted with was the consciousness that he had
+not, after all, pronounced her anything: she nursed
+herself into the sense that he had beautifully got out
+of it. Did he think, however, she wondered, that
+he could keep out of it to the end?&mdash;though, as she
+weighed the question, she yet felt it a little unjust.
+Milly weighed, in this extraordinary hour, questions
+numerous and strange; but she had, happily, before
+she moved, worked round to a simplification.
+Stranger than anything, for instance, was the effect
+of its rolling over her that, when one considered it,
+he might perhaps have "got out" by one door but
+to come in with a beautiful, beneficent dishonesty by
+another. It kept her more intensely motionless
+there that what he might fundamentally be "up to"
+was some disguised intention of standing by her as a
+friend. Wasn't that what women always said they
+wanted to do when they deprecated the addresses of
+gentlemen they couldn't more intimately go on with?
+It was what they, no doubt, sincerely fancied they
+could make of men of whom they couldn't make
+husbands. And she didn't even reason that it was,
+by a similar law, the expedient of doctors in general
+for the invalids of whom they couldn't make patients:
+she was somehow so sufficiently aware that
+<i>her</i> doctor was&mdash;however fatuous it might sound&mdash;exceptionally
+moved. This was the damning little
+fact&mdash;if she could talk of damnation: that she could
+believe herself to have caught him in the act of irrelevantly
+liking her. She hadn't gone to him to be
+liked, she had gone to him to be judged; and he was
+quite a great enough man to be in the habit, as a
+rule, of observing the difference. She could like
+<i>him,</i> as she distinctly did&mdash;that was another matter;
+all the more that her doing so was now, so obviously
+for herself, compatible with judgment. Yet it
+would have been all portentously mixed had not, as
+we say, a final, merciful wave, chilling rather, but
+washing clear, come to her assistance.
+</p><p>
+It came, of a sudden, when all other thought was
+spent. She had been asking herself why, if her case
+was grave&mdash;and she knew what she meant by that&mdash;he
+should have talked to her at all about what she
+might with futility "do"; or why on the other
+hand, if it were light, he should attach an importance
+to the office of friendship. She had him, with her
+little lonely acuteness&mdash;as acuteness went during the
+dog-days in the Regent's Park&mdash;in a cleft stick: she
+either mattered, and then she was ill; or she didn't
+matter, and then she was well enough. Now he was
+"acting," as they said at home, as if she did matter&mdash;until
+he should prove the contrary. It was too
+evident that a person at his high pressure must keep
+his inconsistencies, which were probably his highest
+amusements, only for the very greatest occasions.
+Her prevision, in fine, of just where she should catch
+him furnished the light of that judgment in which
+we describe her as daring to indulge. And the
+judgment it was that made her sensation simple.
+He <i>had</i> distinguished her&mdash;that was the chill. He
+hadn't known&mdash;how could he?&mdash;that she was devilishly
+subtle, subtle exactly in the manner of the suspected,
+the suspicious, the condemned. He in fact
+confessed to it, in his way, as to an interest in her
+combinations, her funny race, her funny losses, her
+funny gains, her funny freedom, and, no doubt,
+above all, her funny manners&mdash;funny, like those of
+Americans at their best, without being vulgar, legitimating
+amiability and helping to pass it off. In his
+appreciation of these redundancies he dressed out for
+her the compassion he so signally permitted himself
+to waste; but its operation for herself was as directly
+divesting, denuding, exposing. It reduced her to
+her ultimate state, which was that of a poor girl
+with her rent to pay for example&mdash;staring before
+her in a great city. Milly had her rent to pay, her
+rent for her future; everything else but how to meet
+it fell away from her in pieces, in tatters. This was
+the sensation the great man had doubtless not purposed.
+Well, she must go home, like the poor girl,
+and see. There might after all be ways; the poor
+girl too would be thinking. It came back for that
+matter perhaps to views already presented. She
+looked about her again, on her feet, at her scattered,
+melancholy comrades&mdash;some of them so melancholy
+as to be down on their stomachs in the grass, turned
+away, ignoring, burrowing; she saw once more,
+with them, those two faces of the question between
+which there was so little to choose for inspiration.
+It was perhaps superficially more striking that one
+could live if one would; but it was more appealing,
+insinuating, irresistible, in short, that one would live
+if one could.
+</p><p>
+She found after this, for the day or two, more
+amusement than she had ventured to count on in
+the fact, if it were not a mere fancy, of deceiving
+Susie; and she presently felt that what made the
+difference was the mere fancy&mdash;as this <i>was</i> one&mdash;of
+a countermove to her great man. His taking on
+himself&mdash;should he do so&mdash;to get at her companion
+made her suddenly, she held, irresponsible, made any
+notion of her own all right for her; though indeed
+at the very moment she invited herself to enjoy this
+impunity she became aware of new matter for surprise,
+or at least for speculation. Her idea would
+rather have been that Mrs. Stringham would have
+looked at her hard&mdash;her sketch of the grounds of
+her long, independent excursion showing, she could
+feel, as almost cynically superficial. Yet the dear
+woman so failed, in the event, to avail herself of any
+right of criticism that it was sensibly tempting, for
+an hour, to wonder if Kate Croy had been playing
+perfectly fair. Hadn't she possibly, from motives
+of the highest benevolence, promptings of the finest
+anxiety, just given poor Susie what she would have
+called the straight tip? It must immediately be
+mentioned, however, that, quite apart from a remembrance
+of the distinctness of Kate's promise, Milly,
+the next thing, found her explanation in a truth that
+had the merit of being general. If Susie, at this
+crisis, suspiciously spared her, it was really that
+Susie was always suspiciously sparing her&mdash;yet occasionally,
+too, with portentous and exceptional
+mercies. The girl was conscious of how she dropped
+at times into inscrutable, impenetrable deferences&mdash;attitudes
+that, though without at all intending it,
+made a difference for familiarity, for the ease of intimacy.
+It was as if she recalled herself to manners,
+to the law of court-etiquette&mdash;which last note above
+all helped our young woman to a just appreciation.
+It was definite for her, even if not quite solid, that
+to treat her as a princess was a positive need of her
+companion's mind; wherefore she couldn't help it if
+this lady had her transcendent view of the way the
+class in question were treated. Susan had read history,
+had read Gibbon and Froude and Saint-Simon;
+she had high-lights as to the special allowances made
+for the class, and, since she saw them, when young,
+as effete and overtutored, inevitably ironic and infinitely
+refined, one must take it for amusing if she
+inclined to an indulgence verily Byzantine. If one
+<i>could</i> only be Byzantine!&mdash;wasn't <i>that</i> what she insidiously
+led one on to sigh? Milly tried to oblige
+her&mdash;for it really placed Susan herself so handsomely
+to be Byzantine now. The great ladies of that
+race&mdash;it would be somewhere in Gibbon&mdash;weren't,
+apparently, questioned about their mysteries. But
+oh, poor Milly and hers! Susan at all events proved
+scarce more inquisitive than if she had been a mosaic
+at Ravenna. Susan was a porcelain monument to
+the odd moral that consideration might, like cynicism,
+have abysses. Besides, the Puritan finally
+disencumbered&mdash;&mdash;! What starved generations
+wasn't Mrs. Stringham, in fancy, going to make up
+for?
+</p><p>
+Kate Croy came straight to the hotel&mdash;came that
+evening shortly before dinner; specifically and publicly
+moreover, in a hansom that, driven apparently
+very fast, pulled up beneath their windows almost
+with the clatter of an accident, a "smash." Milly,
+alone, as happened, in the great garnished void of
+their sitting-room, where, a little, really, like a caged
+Byzantine, she had been pacing through the queer,
+long-drawn, almost sinister delay of night, an effect
+she yet liked&mdash;Milly, at the sound, one of the French
+windows standing open, passed out to the balcony
+that overhung, with pretensions, the general entrance,
+and so was in time for the look that Kate,
+alighting, paying her cabman, happened to send up
+to the front. The visitor moreover had a shilling
+back to wait for, during which Milly, from the balcony,
+looked down at her, and a mute exchange, but
+with smiles and nods, took place between them on
+what had occurred in the morning. It was what
+Kate had called for, and the tone was thus, almost
+by accident, determined for Milly before her friend
+came up. What was also, however, determined for
+her was, again, yet irrepressibly again, that the
+image presented to her, the splendid young woman
+who looked so particularly handsome in impatience,
+with the fine freedom of her signal, was the peculiar
+property of somebody else's vision, that this fine
+freedom in short was the fine freedom she showed
+Mr. Densher. Just so was how she looked to
+him, and just so was how Milly was held by
+her&mdash;held as by the strange sense of seeing through
+that distant person's eyes. It lasted, as usual, the
+strange sense, but fifty seconds; yet in so lasting
+it produced an effect. It produced in fact more
+than one, and we take them in their order. The
+first was that it struck our young woman as absurd
+to say that a girl's looking so to a man could
+possibly be without connections; and the second was
+that by the time Kate had got into the room Milly
+was in mental possession of the main connection it
+must have for herself.
+</p><p>
+She produced this commodity on the spot&mdash;produced
+it, that is, in straight response to Kate's frank
+"Well, what?" The inquiry bore of course, with
+Kate's eagerness, on the issue of the morning's
+scene, the great man's latest wisdom, and it doubtless
+affected Milly a little as the cheerful demand for
+news is apt to affect troubled spirits when news is
+not, in one of the neater forms, prepared for delivery.
+She couldn't have said what it was exactly that, on
+the instant, determined her; the nearest description
+of it would perhaps have been as the more vivid impression
+of all her friend took for granted. The
+contrast between this free quantity and the maze of
+possibilities through which, for hours, she had herself
+been picking her way, put on, in short, for the
+moment, a grossness that even friendly forms scarce
+lightened: it helped forward in fact the revelation
+to herself that she absolutely had nothing to tell.
+Besides which, certainly, there was something else&mdash;an
+influence, at the particular juncture, still more
+obscure. Kate had lost, on the way upstairs, the
+look&mdash;<i>the</i> look&mdash;that made her young hostess so subtly
+think and one of the signs of which was that she
+never kept it for many moments at once; yet she
+stood there, none the less, so in her bloom and in her
+strength, so completely again the "handsome girl"
+beyond all others, the "handsome girl" for whom
+Milly had at first gratefully taken her, that to meet
+her now with the note of the plaintive would amount
+somehow to a surrender, to a confession. <i>She</i>
+would never in her life be ill; the greatest doctor
+would keep her, at the worst, the fewest minutes;
+and it was as if she had asked just <i>with</i> all this practical
+impeccability for all that was most mortal in
+her friend. These things, for Milly, inwardly
+danced their dance; but the vibration produced and
+the dust kicked up had lasted less than our account
+of them. Almost before she knew it she was answering,
+and answering, beautifully, with no consciousness
+of fraud, only as with a sudden flare of the
+famous "will-power" she had heard about, read
+about, and which was what her medical adviser had
+mainly thrown her back on. "Oh, it's all right.
+He's lovely."
+</p><p>
+Kate was splendid, and it would have been clear
+for Milly now, had the further presumption been
+needed, that she had said no word to Mrs. Stringham.
+"You mean you've been absurd?"
+</p><p>
+"Absurd." It was a simple word to say, but the
+consequence of it, for our young woman, was that
+she felt it, as soon as spoken, to have done something
+for her safety.
+</p><p>
+And Kate really hung on her lips. "There's
+nothing at all the matter?"
+</p><p>
+"Nothing to worry about. I shall take a little
+watching, but I shan't have to do anything dreadful,
+or even, in the least, inconvenient. I can do in fact
+as I like." It was wonderful for Milly how just to
+put it so made all its pieces fall at present quite properly
+into places.
+</p><p>
+Yet even before the full effect came Kate had
+seized, kissed, blessed her. "My love, you're too
+sweet! It's too dear! But it's as I was sure."
+Then she grasped the full beauty. "You can do as
+you like?"
+</p><p>
+"Quite. Isn't it charming?"
+</p><p>
+"Ah, but catch you," Kate triumphed with gaiety,
+<i>"not</i> doing&mdash;&mdash;! And what <i>shall</i> you do?"
+</p><p>
+"For the moment simply enjoy it. Enjoy"&mdash;Milly
+was completely luminous&mdash;"having got out of
+my scrape."
+</p><p>
+"Learning, you mean, so easily, that you <i>are</i>
+well."
+</p><p>
+It was as if Kate had but too conveniently put the
+words into her mouth. "Learning, I mean, so easily,
+that I <i>am</i> well."
+</p><p>
+"Only, no one's of course well enough to stay in
+London now. He can't," Kate went on, "want
+this of you."
+</p><p>
+"Mercy, no&mdash;I'm to knock about. I'm to go to
+places."
+</p><p>
+"But not beastly 'climates'&mdash;Engadines, Rivieras,
+boredoms?"
+</p><p>
+"No; just, as I say, where I prefer. I'm to go in
+for pleasure."
+</p><p>
+"Oh, the duck!"&mdash;Kate, with her own shades of
+familiarity, abounded. "But what kind of pleasure?"
+</p><p>
+"The highest," Milly smiled.
+</p><p>
+Her friend met it as nobly. "Which is the
+highest?"
+</p><p>
+"Well, it's just our chance to find out. You must
+help me."
+</p><p>
+"What have I wanted to do but help you," Kate
+asked, "from the moment I first laid eyes on you?"
+Yet with this too Kate had her wonder. "I like
+your talking, though, about that. What help, with
+your luck all round, do you want?"
+</p>
+<br>
+<h2 align="center">XIV</h2>
+<br>
+<p>
+Milly indeed at last couldn't say; so that she had
+really for the time brought it along to the point so
+oddly marked for her by her visitor's arrival, the
+truth that she was enviably strong. She carried this
+out, from that evening, for each hour still left her,
+and the more easily perhaps that the hours were now
+narrowly numbered. All she actually waited for
+was Sir Luke Strett's promised visit; as to her proceeding
+on which, however, her mind was quite made
+up. Since he wanted to get at Susie he should have
+the freest access, and then perhaps he would see how
+he liked it. What was between <i>them</i> they might
+settle as between them, and any pressure it should lift
+from her own spirit they were at liberty to convert
+to their use. If the dear man wished to fire Susan
+Shepherd with a still higher ideal, he would only
+after all, at the worst, have Susan on his hands. If
+devotion, in a word, was what it would come up for
+the interested pair to organise, she was herself ready
+to consume it as the dressed and served dish. He
+had talked to her of her "appetite" her account of
+which, she felt, must have been vague. But for devotion,
+she could now see, this appetite would be of
+the best. Gross, greedy, ravenous&mdash;these were
+doubtless the proper names for her: she was at all
+events resigned in advance to the machinations of
+sympathy. The day that followed her lonely excursion
+was to be the last but two or three of their stay
+in London; and the evening of that day practically
+ranked for them as, in the matter of outside relations,
+the last of all. People were by this time quite scattered,
+and many of those who had so liberally manifested
+in calls, in cards, in evident sincerity about
+visits, later on, over the land, had positively passed
+in music out of sight; whether as members, these
+latter, more especially, of Mrs. Lowder's immediate
+circle or as members of Lord Mark's&mdash;our friends
+being by this time able to make the distinction. The
+general pitch had thus, decidedly, dropped, and the
+occasions still to be dealt with were special and few.
+One of these, for Milly, announced itself as the doctor's
+call already mentioned, as to which she had now
+had a note from him: the single other, of importance,
+was their appointed leave-taking&mdash;for the
+shortest separation&mdash;in respect to Mrs. Lowder and
+Kate. The aunt and the niece were to dine with
+them alone, intimately and easily&mdash;as easily as
+should be consistent with the question of their afterwards
+going on together to some absurdly belated
+party, at which they had had it from Aunt Maud that
+they would do well to show. Sir Luke was to make
+his appearance on the morrow of this, and in respect
+to that complication Milly had already her plan.
+</p><p>
+The night was, at all events, hot and stale, and it
+was late enough by the time the four ladies had been
+gathered in, for their small session, at the hotel,
+where the windows were still open to the high balconies
+and the flames of the candles, behind the pink
+shades&mdash;disposed as for the vigil of watchers&mdash;were
+motionless in the air in which the season lay dead.
+What was presently settled among them was that
+Milly, who betrayed on this occasion a preference
+more marked than usual, should not hold herself
+obliged to climb that evening the social stair, however
+it might stretch to meet her, and that, Mrs.
+Lowder and Mrs. Stringham facing the ordeal together,
+Kate Croy should remain with her and await
+their return. It was a pleasure to Milly, ever, to
+send Susan Shepherd forth; she saw her go with
+complacency, liked, as it were, to put people off with
+her, and noted with satisfaction, when she so moved
+to the carriage, the further denudation&mdash;a markedly
+ebbing tide&mdash;of her little benevolent back. If it
+wasn't quite Aunt Maud's ideal, moreover, to take
+out the new American girl's funny friend instead of
+the new American girl herself, nothing could better
+indicate the range of that lady's merit than the spirit
+in which&mdash;as at the present hour for instance&mdash;she
+made the best of the minor advantage. And she did
+this with a broad, cheerful absence of illusion; she
+did it&mdash;confessing even as much to poor Susie&mdash;because,
+frankly, she <i>was</i> good-natured. When Mrs.
+Stringham observed that her own light was too abjectly
+borrowed and that it was as a link alone,
+fortunately not missing, that she was valued, Aunt
+Maud concurred to the extent of the remark: "Well,
+my dear, you're better than nothing." To-night,
+furthermore, it came up for Milly that Aunt Maud
+had something particular in mind. Mrs. Stringham,
+before adjourning with her, had gone off for
+some shawl or other accessory, and Kate, as if a little
+impatient for their withdrawal, had wandered out
+to the balcony, where she hovered, for the time, unseen,
+though with scarce more to look at than the
+dim London stars and the cruder glow, up the street,
+on a corner, of a small public-house, in front of
+which a fagged cab-horse was thrown into relief.
+Mrs. Lowder made use of the moment: Milly felt
+as soon as she had spoken that what she was doing
+was somehow for use.
+</p><p>
+"Dear Susan tells me that you saw, in America,
+Mr. Densher&mdash;whom I've never till now, as you may
+have noticed, asked you about. But do you mind at
+last, in connection with him, doing something for
+me?" She had lowered her fine voice to a depth,
+though speaking with all her rich glibness; and
+Milly, after a small sharpness of surprise, was already
+guessing the sense of her appeal. "Will you
+name him, in any way you like, to <i>her"</i>&mdash;and Aunt
+Maud gave a nod at the window; "so that you may
+perhaps find out whether he's back?"
+</p><p>
+Ever so many things, for Milly, fell into line at
+this; it was a wonder, she afterwards thought, that
+she could be conscious of so many at once. She
+smiled hard, however, for them all. "But I don't
+know that it's important to me to 'find out.'" The
+array of things was further swollen, however, even
+as she said this, by its striking her as too much to
+say. She therefore tried as quickly to say less.
+"Except you mean, of course, that it's important to
+<i>you."</i> She fancied Aunt Maud was looking at her
+almost as hard as she was herself smiling, and that
+gave her another impulse. "You know I never
+<i>have</i> yet named him to her; so that if I should break
+out now&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"Well?"&mdash;Mrs. Lowder waited.
+</p><p>
+"Why, she may wonder what I've been making
+a mystery of. She hasn't mentioned him, you
+know," Milly went on, "herself."
+</p><p>
+"No"&mdash;her friend a little heavily weighed it&mdash;"she
+wouldn't. So it's she, you see then, who has
+made the mystery."
+</p><p>
+Yes, Milly but wanted to see; only there was so
+much. "There has been of course no particular
+reason." Yet that indeed was neither here nor there.
+"Do you think," she asked, "he is back?"
+</p><p>
+"It will be about his time, I gather, and rather a
+comfort to me definitely to know."
+</p><p>
+"Then can't you ask her yourself?"
+</p><p>
+"Ah, we never speak of him!"
+</p><p>
+It helped Milly for the moment to the convenience
+of a puzzled pause. "Do you mean he's an acquaintance
+of whom you disapprove for her?"
+</p><p>
+Aunt Maud, as well, just hung fire. "I disapprove
+of <i>her</i> for the poor young man. She doesn't
+care for him."
+</p><p>
+"And <i>he</i> cares so much&mdash;&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+"Too much, too much. And my fear is," said
+Mrs. Lowder, "that he privately besets her. She
+keeps it to herself, but I don't want her worried.
+Neither, in truth," she both generously and confidentially
+concluded, "do I want <i>him."</i>
+</p><p>
+Milly showed all her own effort to meet the case.
+"But what can <i>I</i> do?"
+</p><p>
+"You can find out where they are. If I myself
+try," Mrs. Lowder explained, "I shall appear to
+treat them as if I supposed them deceiving me."
+</p><p>
+"And you don't. You don't," Milly mused for
+her, "suppose them deceiving you."
+</p><p>
+"Well," said Aunt Maud, whose fine onyx eyes
+failed to blink, even though Milly's questions might
+have been taken as drawing her rather further than
+she had originally meant to go&mdash;"well, Kate is thoroughly
+aware of my views for her, and that I take
+her being with me, at present, in the way she is with
+me, if you know what I mean, as a loyal assent to
+them. Therefore as my views don't happen to provide
+a place, at all, for Mr. Densher, much, in a manner,
+as I like him"&mdash;therefore, therefore in short
+she had been prompted to this step, though she completed
+her sense, but sketchily, with the rattle of her
+large fan.
+</p><p>
+It assisted them perhaps, however, for the moment,
+that Milly was able to pick out of her sense
+what might serve as the clearest part of it. "You
+do like him then?"
+</p><p>
+"Oh dear, yes. Don't you?"
+</p><p>
+Milly hesitated, for the question was somehow as
+the sudden point of something sharp on a nerve that
+winced. She just caught her breath, but she had
+ground for joy afterwards, she felt, in not really
+having failed to choose with quickness sufficient, out
+of fifteen possible answers, the one that would best
+serve her. She was then almost proud, as well, that
+she had cheerfully smiled. "I did&mdash;three times&mdash;in
+New York." So came and went for her, in these
+simple words, the speech that was to figure for her,
+later on, that night, as the one she had ever uttered
+that cost her most. She was to lie awake, at all
+events, half the night, for the gladness of not having
+taken any line so really inferior as the denial of a
+happy impression.
+</p><p>
+For Mrs. Lowder also, moreover, her simple
+words were the right ones; they were at any rate,
+that lady's laugh showed, in the natural note of the
+racy. "You dear American thing! But people
+may be very good, and yet not good for what one
+wants."
+</p><p>
+"Yes," the girl assented, "even I suppose when
+what one wants is something very good."
+</p><p>
+"Oh, my child, it would take too long just now
+to tell you all <i>I</i> want! I want everything at once
+and together&mdash;and ever so much for you too, you
+know. But you've seen us," Aunt Maud continued;
+"you'll have made out."
+</p><p>
+"Ah," said Milly, "I <i>don't</i> make out"; for again&mdash;it
+came that way in rushes&mdash;she felt an obscurity
+in things. "Why, if our friend here doesn't like
+him&mdash;&mdash;"
+</p><p>
+"Should I conceive her interested in keeping
+things from me?" Mrs. Lowder did justice to the
+question. "My dear, how can you ask? Put yourself
+in her place. She meets me, but on <i>her</i> terms.
+Proud young women are proud young women. And
+proud old ones are&mdash;well, what <i>I</i> am. Fond of you
+as we both are, you can help us."
+</p><p>
+Milly tried to be inspired. "Does it come back
+then to my asking her straight?"
+</p><p>
+At this, however, finally, Aunt Maud threw her
+up. "Oh, if you've so many reasons not&mdash;&mdash;!"
+</p><p>
+"I've not so many," Milly smiled "but I've one.
+If I break out so suddenly as knowing him, what will
+she make of my not having spoken before?"
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Lowder looked blank at it. "Why should
+you care what she makes? You may have only been
+decently discreet."
+</p><p>
+"Ah, I <i>have</i> been," the girl made haste to say.
+</p><p>
+"Besides," her friend went on, "I suggested to
+you, through Susan, your line."
+</p><p>
+"Yes, that reason's a reason for <i>me."</i>
+</p><p>
+"And for <i>me,"</i> Mrs. Lowder insisted. "She's
+not therefore so stupid as not to do justice to grounds
+so marked. You can tell her perfectly that I had
+asked you to say nothing."
+</p><p>
+"And may I tell her that you've asked me now
+to speak?"
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Lowder might well have thought, yet, oddly,
+this pulled her up. "You can't do it without&mdash;&mdash;?"
+</p><p>
+Milly was almost ashamed to be raising so many
+difficulties. "I'll do what I can if you'll kindly tell
+me one thing more." She faltered a little&mdash;it was
+so prying; but she brought it out. "Will he have
+been writing to her?"
+</p><p>
+"It's exactly, my dear, what I should like to
+know." Mrs. Lowder was at last impatient.
+"Push in for yourself, and I dare say she'll tell
+you."
+</p><p>
+Even now, all the same, Milly had not quite fallen
+back. "It will be pushing in," she continued to
+smile, "for <i>you"</i> She allowed her companion,
+however, no time to take this up. "The point will
+be that if he <i>has</i> been writing she may have answered."
+</p><p>
+"But what point, you subtle thing, is that?"
+</p><p>
+"It isn't subtle, it seems to me, but quite simple,"
+Milly said, "that if she has answered she has very
+possibly spoken of me."
+</p><p>
+"Very certainly indeed. But what difference
+will it make?"
+</p><p>
+The girl had a moment, at this, of thinking it natural
+that her interlocutress herself should so fail of
+subtlety. "It will make the difference that he will
+have written to her in answer that he knows me.
+And that, in turn," our young woman explained,
+"will give an oddity to my own silence."
+</p><p>
+"How so, if she's perfectly aware of having given
+you no opening? The only oddity," Aunt Maud
+lucidly professed, "is for yourself. It's in <i>her</i> not
+having spoken."
+</p><p>
+"Ah, there we are!" said Milly.
+</p><p>
+And she had uttered it, evidently, in a tone
+that struck her friend. "Then it <i>has</i> troubled
+you?"
+</p><p>
+But ah, the inquiry had only to be made to bring
+the rare colour with fine inconsequence, to her face.
+"Not, really, the least little bit!" And, quickly
+feeling the need to abound in this sense, she was on
+the point, to cut short, of declaring that she cared,
+after all, no scrap how much she obliged. Only she
+felt at this instant too the intervention of still other
+things. Mrs. Lowder was, in the first place, already
+beforehand, already affected as by the sudden vision
+of her having herself pushed too far. Milly could
+never judge from her face of her uppermost motive&mdash;it
+was so little, in its hard, smooth sheen, that kind
+of human countenance. She looked hard when she
+spoke fair; the only thing was that when she spoke
+hard she likewise didn't look soft. Something, none
+the less, had arisen in her now&mdash;a full appreciable
+tide, entering by the rupture of some bar. She announced
+that if what she had asked was to prove in
+the least a bore her young friend was not to dream
+of it; making her young friend at the same time, by
+the change in her tone, dream on the spot more profusely.
+She spoke with a belated light, Milly could
+apprehend&mdash;she could always apprehend&mdash;from
+pity; and the result of that perception, for the girl,
+was singular: it proved to her as quickly that Kate,
+keeping her secret, had been straight with her.
+From Kate distinctly then, as to why she was to be
+pitied, Aunt Maud knew nothing, and was thereby
+simply putting in evidence the fine side of her own
+character. This fine side was that she could almost
+at any hour, by a kindled preference or a diverted
+energy, glow for another interest than her own.
+She exclaimed as well, at this moment, that Milly
+must have been thinking, round the case, much more
+than she had supposed; and this remark could, at
+once, affect the girl as sharply as any other form of
+the charge of weakness. It was what everyone, if
+she didn't look out, would soon be saying&mdash;"There's
+something the matter with you!" What one was
+therefore one's self concerned immediately to establish
+was that there was nothing at all. "I shall like
+to help you; I shall like, so far as that goes, to help
+Kate herself," she made such haste as she could to
+declare; her eyes wandering meanwhile across the
+width of the room to that dusk of the balcony in
+which their companion perhaps a little unaccountably
+lingered. She suggested hereby her impatience
+to begin; she almost overtly wondered at the length
+of the opportunity this friend was giving them&mdash;referring
+it, however, so far as words went, to the
+other friend, breaking off with an amused: "How
+tremendously Susie must be beautifying!"
+</p><p>
+It only marked Aunt Maud, none the less, as too
+preoccupied for her allusion. The onyx eyes were
+fixed upon her with a polished pressure that must
+signify some enriched benevolence. "Let it go, my
+dear. We shall, after all, soon enough see."
+</p><p>
+"If he <i>has</i> come back we shall certainly see,"
+Milly after a moment replied; "for he'll probably
+feel that he can't quite civilly not come to see
+me. Then <i>there,"</i> she remarked, "we shall be. It
+wouldn't then, you see, come through Kate at all&mdash;it
+would come through him. Except," she wound
+up with a smile, "that he won't find me."
+</p><p>
+She had the most extraordinary sense of interesting
+her interlocutress, in spite of herself, more than
+she wanted; it was as if her doom so floated her on
+that she couldn't stop&mdash;by very much the same trick
+it had played her with her doctor. "Shall you run
+away from him?"
+</p><p>
+She neglected the question, wanting only now to
+get off. "Then," she went on, "you'll deal with
+Kate directly."
+</p><p>
+"Shall you run away from <i>her?"</i> Mrs. Lowder
+profoundly inquired, while they became aware of
+Susie's return through the room, opening out behind
+them, in which they had dined.
+</p><p>
+This affected Milly as giving her but an instant;
+and suddenly, with it, everything she felt in the connection
+rose to her lips in a question that, even as she
+put it, she knew she was failing to keep colourless.
+"Is it your own belief that he <i>is</i> with her?"
+</p><p>
+Aunt Maud took it in&mdash;took in, that is, everything
+of the tone that she just wanted her not to; and the
+result for some seconds, was but to make their eyes
+meet in silence. Mrs. Stringham had rejoined them
+and was asking if Kate had gone&mdash;an inquiry at once
+answered by this young lady's reappearance. They
+saw her again in the open window, where, looking
+at them, she had paused&mdash;producing thus, on Aunt
+Maud's part, almost too impressive a "Hush!"
+Mrs. Lowder indeed, without loss of time, smothered
+any danger in a sweeping retreat with Susie;
+but Milly's words to her, just uttered, about dealing
+with her niece directly, struck our young woman as
+already recoiling on herself. Directness, however
+evaded, would be, fully, for <i>her;</i> nothing in fact
+would ever have been for her so direct as the evasion.
+Kate had remained in the window, very handsome
+and upright, the outer dark framing in a highly
+favourable way her summery simplicities and lightnesses
+of dress. Milly had, given the relation of
+space, no real fear she had heard their talk; only she
+hovered there as with conscious eyes and some added
+advantage. Then indeed, with small delay, her
+friend sufficiently saw. The conscious eyes, the
+added advantage were but those she had now always
+at command&mdash;those proper to the person Milly knew
+as known to Merton Densher. It was for several
+seconds again as if the <i>total</i> of her identity had been
+that of the person known to him&mdash;a determination
+having for result another sharpness of its own.
+Kate had positively but to be there just as she was to
+tell her he had come back. It seemed to pass between
+them, in fine, without a word, that he was in
+London, that he was perhaps only round the corner;
+and surely therefore no dealing of Milly's with her
+would yet have been so direct.
+</p>
+<br>
+<h2 align="center">XV</h2>
+<br>
+<p>
+It was doubtless because this queer form of directness
+had in itself, for the hour, seemed so sufficient
+that Milly was afterwards aware of having really,
+all the while&mdash;during the strange, indescribable session
+before the return of their companions&mdash;done
+nothing to intensify it. If she was most aware only
+afterwards, under the long, discurtained ordeal of
+the morrow's dawn, that was because she had really,
+till their evening's end came, ceased, after a little,
+to miss anything from their ostensible comfort.
+What was behind showed but in gleams and
+glimpses; what was in front never at all confessed
+to not holding the stage. Three minutes had not
+passed before Milly quite knew she should have done
+nothing Aunt Maud had just asked her. She knew
+it moreover by much the same light that had acted
+for her with that lady and with Sir Luke Strett. It
+pressed upon her then and there that she was still in
+a current determined, through her indifference, timidity,
+bravery, generosity&mdash;she scarce could say
+which&mdash;by others; that not she but the current
+acted, and that somebody else, always, was the
+keeper of the lock or the dam. Kate for example
+had but to open the flood-gate: the current moved
+in its mass&mdash;the current, as it had been, of her doing
+as Kate wanted. What, somehow, in the most
+extraordinary way in the world, <i>had</i> Kate wanted
+but to be, of a sudden, more interesting than she had
+ever been? Milly, for their evening then, quite held
+her breath with the appreciation of it. If she hadn't
+been sure her companion would have had nothing,
+from her moments with Mrs. Lowder, to go by, she
+would almost have seen the admirable creature "cutting in"
+to anticipate a danger. This fantasy indeed,
+while they sat together, dropped after a little;
+even if only because other fantasies multiplied and
+clustered, making fairly, for our young woman, the
+buoyant medium in which her friend talked and
+moved. They sat together, I say, but Kate moved
+as much as she talked; she figured there, restless and
+charming, just perhaps a shade perfunctory, repeatedly
+quitting her place, taking slowly, to and fro, in
+the trailing folds of her light dress, the length of the
+room, and almost avowedly performing for the
+pleasure of her hostess.
+</p><p>
+Mrs. Lowder had said to Milly at Matcham that
+she and her niece, as allies, could practically conquer
+the world; but though it was a speech about which
+there had even then been a vague, grand glamour,
+the girl read into it at present more of an approach
+to a meaning. Kate, for that matter, by herself,
+could conquer anything, and <i>she,</i> Milly Theale, was
+probably concerned with the "world" only as the
+small scrap of it that most impinged on her and that
+was therefore first to be dealt with. On this basis
+of being dealt with she would doubtless herself do
+her share of the conquering: she would have something
+to supply, Kate something to take&mdash;each of
+them thus, to that tune, something for squaring with
+Aunt Maud's ideal. This in short was what it came
+to now&mdash;that the occasion, in the quiet late lamplight,
+had the quality of a rough rehearsal of the possible
+big drama. Milly knew herself dealt with&mdash;handsomely,
+completely: she surrendered to the
+knowledge, for so it was, she felt, that she supplied
+her helpful force. And what Kate had to take Kate
+took as freely and, to all appearance, as gratefully;
+accepting afresh, with each of her long, slow walks,
+the relation between them so established and consecrating
+her companion's surrender simply by the interest
+she gave it. The interest to Milly herself we
+naturally mean; the interest to Kate Milly felt as
+probably inferior. It easily and largely came for
+their present talk, for the quick flight of the hour
+before the breach of the spell&mdash;it all came, when considered,
+from the circumstance, not in the least abnormal,
+that the handsome girl was in extraordinary
+"form." Milly remembered her having said that
+she was at her best late at night; remembered it by
+its having, with its fine assurance, made her wonder
+when <i>she</i> was at her best and how happy people must
+be who had such a fixed time. She had no time at
+all; she was never at her best&mdash;unless indeed it were
+exactly, as now, in listening, watching, admiring,
+collapsing. If Kate moreover, quite mercilessly,
+had never been so good, the beauty and the marvel
+of it was that she had never really been so frank;
+being a person of such a calibre, as Milly would have
+said, that, even while "dealing" with you and thereby,
+as it were, picking her steps, she could let herself
+go, could, in irony, in confidence, in extravagance,
+tell you things she had never told before. That was
+the impression&mdash;that she was telling things, and
+quite conceivably for her own relief as well; almost
+as if the errors of vision, the mistakes of proportion,
+the residuary innocence of spirit still to be remedied
+on the part of her auditor had their moments of proving
+too much for her nerves. She went at them just
+now, these sources of irritation, with an amused
+energy that it would have been open to Milly to regard
+as cynical and that was nevertheless called for&mdash;as
+to this the other was distinct&mdash;by the way that
+in certain connections the American mind broke
+down. It seemed at least&mdash;the American mind as
+sitting there thrilled and dazzled in Milly&mdash;not to
+understand English society without a separate confrontation
+with <i>all</i> the cases. It couldn't proceed
+by&mdash;there was some technical term she lacked until
+Milly suggested both analogy and induction, and
+then, differently, instinct, none of which were right:
+it had to be led up and introduced to each aspect of
+the monster, enabled to walk all round it, whether for
+the consequent exaggerated ecstasy or for the still
+more as appeared to this critic disproportionate
+shock. It might, the monster, Kate conceded, loom
+large for those born amid forms less developed and
+therefore no doubt less amusing; it might on some
+sides be a strange and dreadful monster, calculated
+to devour the unwary, to abase the proud, to scandalize
+the good; but if one had to live with it one must,
+not to be for ever sitting up, learn how: which was
+virtually in short to-night what the handsome girl
+showed herself as teaching.
+</p><p>
+She gave away publicly, in this process, Lancaster
+Gate and everything it contained; she gave away,
+hand over hand, Milly's thrill continued to note,
+Aunt Maud and Aunt Maud's glories and Aunt
+Maud's complacencies; she gave herself away most
+of all, and it was naturally what most contributed to
+her candour. She didn't speak to her friend once
+more, in Aunt Maud's strain, of how they could scale
+the skies; she spoke, by her bright, perverse preference
+on this occasion, of the need, in the first place,
+of being neither stupid nor vulgar. It might have
+been a lesson, for our young American, in the art of
+seeing things as they were&mdash;a lesson so various and
+so sustained that the pupil had, as we have shown,
+but receptively to gape. The odd thing furthermore
+was that it could serve its purpose while explicitly
+disavowing every personal bias. It wasn't that she
+disliked Aunt Maud, who was everything she had on
+other occasions declared; but the dear woman, ineffaceably
+stamped by inscrutable nature and a dreadful
+art, wasn't&mdash;how <i>could</i> she be?&mdash;what she
+wasn't. She wasn't any one. She wasn't anything.
+She wasn't anywhere. Milly mustn't think it&mdash;one
+couldn't, as a good friend, let her. Those hours at
+Matcham were <i>inespérées,</i> were pure manna from
+heaven; or if not wholly that perhaps, with humbugging
+old Lord Mark as a backer, were vain as a
+ground for hopes and calculations. Lord Mark was
+very well, but he wasn't <i>the</i> cleverest creature in
+England, and even if he had been he still wouldn't
+have been the most obliging. He weighed it out in
+ounces, and indeed each of the pair was really waiting
+for what the other would put down.
+</p><p>
+"She has put down <i>you."</i> said Milly, attached to
+the subject still; "and I think what you mean
+is that, on the counter, she still keeps hold of
+you."
+</p><p>
+"Lest"&mdash;Kate took it up&mdash;"he should suddenly
+grab me and run? Oh, as he isn't ready to run, he's
+much less ready, naturally, to grab. I <i>am</i>&mdash;you're
+so far right as that&mdash;on the counter, when I'm not
+in the shop-window; in and out of which I'm thus
+conveniently, commercially whisked: the essence, all
+of it, of my position, and the price, as properly, of
+my aunt's protection." Lord Mark was substantially
+what she had begun with as soon as they were
+alone; the impression was even yet with Milly of
+her having sounded his name, having imposed it, as
+a topic, in direct opposition to the other name that
+Mrs. Lowder had left in the air and that all her own
+look, as we have seen, kept there at first for her companion.
+The immediate strange effect had been that
+of her consciously needing, as it were, an alibi&mdash;which,
+successfully, she so found. She had worked
+it to the end, ridden it to and fro across the course
+marked for Milly by Aunt Maud, and now she had
+quite, so to speak, broken it in. "The bore is that
+if she wants him so much&mdash;wants him, heaven forgive
+her! for <i>me</i>&mdash;he has put us all out, since your
+arrival, by wanting somebody else. I don't mean
+somebody else than you."
+</p><p>
+Milly threw off the charm sufficiently to shake
+her head. "Then I haven't made out who it is.
+If I'm any part of his alternative he had better stop
+where he is."
+</p><p>
+"Truly, truly?&mdash;always, always?"
+</p><p>
+Milly tried to insist with an equal gaiety.
+"Would you like me to swear?"
+</p><p>
+Kate appeared for a moment&mdash;though that was
+doubtless but gaiety too&mdash;to think. "Haven't we
+been swearing enough?"
+</p><p>
+"You have perhaps, but I haven't, and I ought to
+give you the equivalent. At any rate there it is.
+Truly, truly as you say&mdash;'always, always.' So
+I'm not in the way."
+</p><p>
+"Thanks," said Kate&mdash;"but that doesn't help
+me."
+</p><p>
+"Oh, it's as simplifying for <i>him</i> that I speak of
+it."
+</p><p>
+"The difficulty really is that he's a person with
+so many ideas that it's particularly hard to simplify
+for him. That's exactly of course what Aunt Maud
+has been trying. He won't," Kate firmly continued,
+"make up his mind about me."
+</p><p>
+"Well," Milly smiled, "give him time."
+</p><p>
+Her friend met it in perfection. "One is <i>doing</i>
+that&mdash;one <i>is.</i> But one remains, all the same, but
+one of his ideas."
+</p><p>
+"There's no harm in that," Milly returned, "if
+you come out in the end as the best of them. What's
+a man," she pursued, "especially an ambitious one,
+without a variety of ideas?"
+</p><p>
+"No doubt. The more the merrier." And Kate
+looked at her grandly. "One can but hope to come
+out, and do nothing to prevent it."
+</p><p>
+All of which made for the impression, fantastic
+or not, of the <i>alibi.</i> The splendour, the grandeur
+were, for Milly, the bold ironic spirit behind it, so
+interesting too in itself. What, moreover, was not
+less interesting was the fact, as our young woman
+noted it, that Kate confined her point to the difficulties,
+so far as <i>she</i> was concerned, raised only by Lord
+Mark. She referred now to none that her own taste
+might present; which circumstance again played its
+little part. She was doing what she liked in respect
+to another person, but she was in no way committed
+to the other person, and her furthermore talking of
+Lord Mark as not young and not true were only the
+signs of her clear self-consciousness, were all in the
+line of her slightly hard, but scarce the less graceful
+extravagance. She didn't wish to show too much
+her consent to be arranged for, but that was a different
+thing from not wishing sufficiently to give it.
+There was something moreover, on it all, that Milly
+still found occasion to say, "If your aunt has been,
+as you tell me, put out by me, I feel that she has
+remained remarkably kind."
+</p><p>
+"Oh, but she has&mdash;whatever might have happened
+in that respect&mdash;plenty of use for you! You
+put her in, my dear, more than you put her out. You
+don't half see it, but she has clutched your petticoat.
+You can do anything&mdash;you can do, I mean, lots that
+<i>we</i> can't. You're an outsider, independent and
+standing by yourself; you're not hideously relative
+to tiers and tiers of others." And Kate, facing in
+that direction, went further and further; wound up,
+while Milly gaped, with extraordinary words.
+"We're of no use to you&mdash;it's decent to tell you.
+You'd be of use to us, but that's a different matter.
+My honest advice to you would be&mdash;" she went
+indeed all lengths&mdash;"to drop us while you can. It
+would be funny if you didn't soon see how awfully
+better you can do. We've not really done for you
+the least thing worth speaking of&mdash;nothing you
+mightn't easily have had in some other way. Therefore
+you're under no obligation. You won't want
+us next year; we shall only continue to want <i>you.</i>
+But that's no reason for you, and you mustn't pay
+too dreadfully for poor Mrs. Stringham's having let
+you in. She has the best conscience in the world;
+she's enchanted with what she has done; but you
+shouldn't take your people from <i>her.</i> It has been
+quite awful to see you do it."
+</p><p>
+Milly tried to be amused, so as not&mdash;it was too
+absurd&mdash;to be fairly frightened. Strange enough
+indeed&mdash;if not natural enough&mdash;that, late at night
+thus, in a mere mercenary house, with Susie away,
+a want of confidence should possess her. She recalled,
+with all the rest of it, the next day, piecing
+things together in the dawn, that she had felt herself
+alone with a creature who paced like a panther.
+That was a violent image, but it made her a little less
+ashamed of having been scared. For all her scare,
+none the less, she had now the sense to find words.
+"And yet without Susie I shouldn't have had you."
+</p><p>
+It had been at this point, however, that Kate
+flickered highest. "Oh, you may very well loathe
+me yet!"
+</p><p>
+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; and, though a small solemnity
+of reproach, a sombre strain, had broken into
+her tone, it was to figure as her nearest approach to
+serving Mrs. Lowder. "Why do you say such
+things to me?"
+</p><p>
+This unexpectedly had acted, by a sudden turn of
+Kate's attitude, as a happy speech. 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; partly
+as if, though a dove who could perch on a finger, one
+were also a princess with whom forms were to be
+observed. It even came to her, through the touch
+of her companion's lips, that this form, this cool pressure,
+fairly sealed the sense of what Kate had just
+said. It was moreover, for the girl, like an inspiration:
+she found herself accepting as the right one,
+while she caught her breath with relief, the name so
+given her. 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. <i>That</i> was
+what was the matter with her. She was a dove.
+Oh, <i>wasn't</i> she?&mdash;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. Lowder,
+with Susan&mdash;which she needn't have done, at that
+hour, instead of letting Kate come down to her; so
+that Milly could be quite sure it was to catch hold,
+in some way, of the loose end they had left. Well,
+the way she did catch was simply to make the point
+that it didn't now in the least matter. She had
+mounted the stairs for this, and she had her moment
+again with her younger hostess while Kate, on the
+spot, as the latter at the time noted, gave Susan
+Shepherd unwonted opportunities. Kate was in
+other words, as Aunt Maud engaged her friend, listening
+with the handsomest response to Mrs. Stringham's
+impression of the scene they had just quitted.
+It was in the tone of the fondest indulgence&mdash;almost,
+really, that of dove cooing to dove&mdash;that Mrs. Lowder
+expressed to Milly the hope that it had all gone
+beautifully. Her "all" had an ample benevolence;
+it soothed and simplified; she spoke as if it were the
+two young women, not she and her comrade, who
+had been facing the town together. But Milly's
+answer had prepared itself while Aunt Maud was on
+the stair; she had felt in a rush all the reasons that
+would make it the most dovelike; and she gave it,
+while she was about it, as earnest, as candid. "I
+don't <i>think,</i> dear lady, he's here."
+</p><p>
+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:
+she studied again the dovelike and so set her companion
+to mere rich reporting that she averted all inquiry
+into her own case.
+</p><p>
+That, with the new day, was once more her law&mdash;though
+she saw before her, of course, as something
+of a complication, her need, each time, to decide.
+She should have to be clear as to how a dove <i>would</i>
+act. She settled it, she thought, well enough this
+morning by quite readopting her plan in respect to
+Sir Luke Strett. That, she was pleased to reflect,
+had originally been pitched in the key of a merely iridescent
+drab; and although Mrs. Stringham, after
+breakfast, began by staring at it as if it had been a
+priceless Persian carpet suddenly unrolled at her
+feet, she had no scruple, at the end of five minutes,
+in leaving her to make the best of it. "Sir Luke
+Strett comes, by appointment, to see me at eleven,
+but I'm going out on purpose. He's to be told,
+please, deceptively, that I'm at home, and, you, as
+my representative, when he comes up, are to see him
+instead. He will like that, this time, better. So do
+be nice to him." It had taken, naturally, more explanation,
+and the mention, above all, of the fact that
+the visitor was the greatest of doctors; yet when
+once the key had been offered Susie slipped it on her
+bunch, and her young friend could again feel her
+lovely imagination operate. It operated in truth
+very much as Mrs. Lowder's, at the last, had done
+the night before: it made the air heavy once more
+with the extravagance of assent. It might, afresh,
+almost have frightened our young woman to see how
+people rushed to meet her: <i>had</i> she then so little
+time to live that the road must always be spared her?
+It was as if they were helping her to take it out on
+the spot. Susie&mdash;she couldn't deny, and didn't pretend
+to&mdash;might, of a truth, on <i>her</i> side, have treated
+such news as a flash merely lurid; as to which, to
+do Susie justice, the pain of it was all there. But,
+none the less, the margin always allowed her young
+friend was all there as well; and the proposal now
+made her what was it in short but Byzantine?
+The vision of Milly's perception of the propriety of
+the matter had, at any rate, quickly engulfed, so far
+as her attitude was concerned, any surprise and any
+shock; so that she only desired, the next thing, perfectly
+to possess the facts. Milly could easily speak,
+on this, as if there were only one: she made nothing
+of such another as that she had felt herself menaced.
+The great fact, in fine, was that she <i>knew</i>
+him to desire just now, more than anything else, to
+meet, quite apart, some one interested in her. Who
+therefore so interested as her faithful Susan? The
+only other circumstance that, by the time she had
+quitted her friend, she had treated as worth mentioning
+was the circumstance of her having at first
+intended to keep quiet. She had originally best seen
+herself as sweetly secretive. As to that she had
+changed, and her present request was the result.
+She didn't say why she had changed, but she trusted
+her faithful Susan. Their visitor would trust her
+not less, and she herself would adore their visitor.
+Moreover he wouldn't&mdash;the girl felt sure&mdash;tell her
+anything dreadful. The worst would be that he
+was in love and that he needed a confidant to work
+it. And now she was going to the National Gallery.
+</p>
+<br>
+<h2 align="center">XVI</h2>
+<br>
+<p>
+The idea of the National Gallery had been with
+her from the moment of her hearing from Sir Luke
+Strett about his hour of coming. It had been in her
+mind as a place so meagrely visited, as one of the
+places that had seemed at home one of the attractions
+of Europe and one of its highest aids to culture, but
+that&mdash;the old story&mdash;the typical frivolous always
+ended by sacrificing to vulgar pleasures. She had
+had perfectly, at those whimsical moments on the
+Brünig, the half-shamed sense of turning her back
+on such opportunities for real improvement as had
+figured to her, from of old, in connection with the
+continental tour, under the general head of "pictures
+and things"; and now she knew for what she had
+done so. The plea had been explicit&mdash;she had done
+so for life, as opposed to learning; the upshot of
+which had been that life was now beautifully provided
+for. In spite of those few dips and dashes
+into the many-coloured stream of history for which
+of late Kate Croy had helped her to find time, there
+were possible great chances she had neglected, possible
+great moments she should, save for to-day, have
+all but missed. She might still, she had felt, overtake
+one or two of them among the Titians and the
+Turners; she had been honestly nursing the hour,
+and, once she was in the benignant halls, her faith
+knew itself justified. It was the air she wanted and
+the world she would now exclusively choose; the
+quiet chambers, nobly overwhelming, rich but slightly
+veiled, opened out round her and made her presently
+say "If I could lose myself <i>here!"</i> There
+were people, people in plenty, but, admirably, no personal
+question. It was immense, outside, the personal
+question; but she had blissfully left it outside,
+and the nearest it came, for a quarter of an hour,
+to glimmering again into sight was when she
+watched for a little one of the more earnest of the
+lady-copyists. Two or three in particular, spectacled,
+aproned, absorbed, engaged her sympathy to
+an absurd extent, seemed to show her for the time
+the right way to live. She should have been a lady copyist&mdash;it
+met so the case. The case was the case
+of escape, of living under water, of being at once
+impersonal and firm. There it was before one&mdash;one
+had only to stick and stick.
+</p><p>
+Milly yielded to this charm till she was almost
+ashamed; she watched the lady-copyists till she
+found herself wondering what would be thought by
+others of a young woman, of adequate aspect, who
+should appear to regard them as the pride of the
+place. She would have liked to talk to them, to get,
+as it figured to her, into their lives, and was deterred
+but by the fact that she didn't quite see herself as
+purchasing imitations and yet feared she might excite
+the expectation of purchase. She really knew
+before long that what held her was the mere refuge,
+that something within her was after all too weak
+for the Turners and Titians. They joined hands
+about her in a circle too vast, though a circle that a
+year before she would only have desired to trace.
+They were truly for the larger, not for the smaller
+life, the life of which the actual pitch, for example,
+was an interest, the interest of compassion, in misguided
+efforts. She marked absurdly her little stations,
+blinking, in her shrinkage of curiosity, at the
+glorious walls, yet keeping an eye on vistas and approaches,
+so that she shouldn't be flagrantly caught.
+The vistas and approaches drew her in this way from
+room to room, and she had been through many parts
+of the show, as she supposed, when she sat down to
+rest. There were chairs in scant clusters, places
+from which one could gaze. Milly indeed at present
+fixed her eyes more than elsewhere on the appearance,
+first, that she couldn't quite, after all, have accounted
+to an examiner for the order of her
+"schools," and then on that of her being more tired
+than she had meant, in spite of her having been so
+much less intelligent. They found, her eyes, it
+should be added, other occupation as well, which she
+let them freely follow: they rested largely, in her
+vagueness, on the vagueness of other visitors; they
+attached themselves in especial, with mixed results,
+to the surprising stream of her compatriots. She
+was struck with the circumstance that the great
+museum, early in August, was haunted with these
+pilgrims, as also with that of her knowing them from
+afar, marking them easily, each and all, and recognising
+not less promptly that they had ever new
+lights for her&mdash;new lights on their own darkness.
+She gave herself up at last, and it was a consummation
+like another: what she should have come to the
+National Gallery for to-day would be to watch the
+copyists and reckon the Baedekers. That perhaps
+was the moral of a menaced state of health&mdash;that one
+would sit in public places and count the Americans.
+It passed the time in a manner; but it seemed already
+the second line of defence, and this notwithstanding
+the pattern, so unmistakable, of her country-folk.
+They were cut out as by scissors, coloured, labelled,
+mounted; but their relation to her failed to act&mdash;they
+somehow did nothing for her. Partly, no
+doubt, they didn't so much as notice or know her,
+didn't even recognise their community of collapse
+with her, the sign on her, as she sat there, that for
+her too Europe was "tough." It came to her idly
+thus&mdash;for her humour could still play&mdash;that she
+didn't seem then the same success with them as with
+the inhabitants of London, who had taken her up on
+scarce more of an acquaintance. She could wonder
+if they would be different should she go back with
+that glamour attached; and she could also wonder,
+if it came to that, whether she should ever go back.
+Her friends straggled past, at any rate, in all the
+vividness of their absent criticism, and she had even
+at last the sense of taking a mean advantage.
+There was a finer instant, however, at which three
+ladies, clearly a mother and daughters, had paused
+before her under compulsion of a comment apparently
+just uttered by one of them and referring to
+some object on the other side of the room. Milly
+had her back to the object, but her face very much
+to her young compatriot, the one who had spoken
+and in whose look she perceived a certain gloom of
+recognition. Recognition, for that matter, sat confessedly
+in her own eyes: she <i>knew</i> the three, generically,
+as easily as a schoolboy with a crib in his lap
+would know the answer in class; she felt, like the
+schoolboy, guilty enough&mdash;questioned, as honour
+went, as to her right so to possess, to dispossess, people
+who hadn't consciously provoked her. She
+would have been able to say where they lived, and
+how, had the place and the way been but amenable
+to the positive; she bent tenderly, in imagination,
+over marital, paternal Mr. Whatever-he-was, at
+home, eternally named, with all the honours and
+placidities, but eternally unseen and existing only
+as some one who could be financially heard from.
+The mother, the puffed and composed whiteness of
+whose hair had no relation to her apparent age,
+showed a countenance almost chemically clean and
+dry; her companions wore an air of vague resentment
+humanised by fatigue; and the three were
+equally adorned with short cloaks of coloured cloth
+surmounted by little tartan hoods. The tartans
+were doubtless conceivable as different, but the
+cloaks, curiously, only thinkable as one. "Handsome?
+Well, if you choose to say so." It was the
+mother who had spoken, who herself added, after a
+pause during which Milly took the reference as to a
+picture: "In the English style." The three pair
+of eyes had converged, and their possessors had for
+an instant rested, with the effect of a drop of the
+subject, on this last characterisation&mdash;with that, too,
+of a gloom not less mute in one of the daughters than
+murmured in the other. Milly's heart went out to
+them while they turned their backs; she said to herself
+that they ought to have known her, that there
+was something between them they might have beautifully
+put together. But she had lost <i>them</i> also&mdash;they
+were cold; they left her in her weak wonder
+as to what they had been looking at. The "handsome"
+disposed her to turn&mdash;all the more that the
+"English style" would be the English school, which
+she liked; only she saw, before moving, by the array
+on the side facing her, that she was in fact among
+small Dutch pictures. The action of this was again
+appreciable&mdash;the dim surmise that it wouldn't then
+be by a picture that the spring in the three ladies had
+been pressed. It was at all events time she should
+go, and she turned as she got on her feet. She had
+had behind her one of the entrances and various visitors
+who had come in while she sat, visitors single
+and in pairs&mdash;by one of the former of whom she felt
+her eyes suddenly held.
+</p><p>
+This was a gentleman in the middle of the place,
+a gentleman who had removed his hat and was for a
+moment, while he glanced, absently, as she could see,
+at the top tier of the collection, tapping his forehead
+with his pocket-handkerchief. The occupation held
+him long enough to give Milly time to take for
+granted&mdash;and a few seconds sufficed&mdash;that his face
+was the object just observed by her friends. This
+could only have been because she concurred in their
+tribute, even qualified, and indeed "the English
+style" of the gentleman&mdash;perhaps by instant contrast
+to the American&mdash;was what had had the arresting
+power. This arresting power, at the same time&mdash;and
+that was the marvel&mdash;had already sharpened
+almost to pain, for in the very act of judging the
+bared head with detachment she felt herself shaken
+by a knowledge of it. It was Merton Densher's
+own, and he was standing there, standing long
+enough unconscious for her to fix him and then hesitate.
+These successions were swift, so that she
+could still ask herself in freedom if she had best let
+him see her. She could still reply to that that she
+shouldn't like him to catch her in the effort to prevent
+this; and she might further have decided that
+he was too preoccupied to see anything had not a
+perception intervened that surpassed the first in violence.
+She was unable to think afterwards how long
+she had looked at him before knowing herself as
+otherwise looked at; all she was coherently to put together
+was that she had had a second recognition
+without his having noticed her. The source of this
+latter shock was nobody less than Kate Croy&mdash;Kate
+Croy who was suddenly also in the line of vision and
+whose eyes met her eyes at their next movement.
+Kate was but two yards off&mdash;Mr. Densher wasn't
+alone. Kate's face specifically said so, for after a
+stare as blank at first as Milly's it broke into a far
+smile. That was what, wonderfully&mdash;in addition to
+the marvel of their meeting&mdash;passed from her for
+Milly; the instant reduction to easy terms of the fact
+of their being there, the two young women, together.
+It was perhaps only afterwards that the girl fully
+felt the connection between this touch and her already
+established conviction that Kate was a prodigious
+person; yet on the spot she none the less, in a
+degree, knew herself handled and again, as she had
+been the night before, dealt with&mdash;absolutely even
+dealt with for her greater pleasure. A minute in
+fine hadn't elapsed before Kate had somehow made
+her provisionally take everything as natural. The
+provisional was just the charm&mdash;acquiring that character
+from one moment to the other; it represented
+happily so much that Kate would explain on the very
+first chance. This left moreover&mdash;and that was the
+greatest wonder&mdash;all due margin for amusement at
+the way things happened, the monstrous oddity of
+their turning up in such a place on the very heels of
+their having separated without allusion to it. The
+handsome girl was thus literally in control of the
+scene by the time Merton Densher was ready to exclaim
+with a high flush, or a vivid blush&mdash;one didn't
+distinguish the embarrassment from the joy&mdash;"Why,
+Miss Theale: fancy!" and "Why, Miss
+Theale: what luck!"
+</p><p>
+Miss Theale had meanwhile the sense that for him
+too, on Kate's part, something wonderful and unspoken
+was determinant; and this although, distinctly,
+his companion had no more looked at him with a
+hint than he had looked at her with a question. He
+had looked and he was looking only at Milly herself,
+ever so pleasantly and considerately&mdash;she scarce
+knew what to call it; but without prejudice to her
+consciousness, all the same, that women got out of
+predicaments better than men. The predicament of
+course wasn't definite or phraseable&mdash;and the way
+they let all phrasing pass was presently to recur to
+our young woman as a characteristic triumph of the
+civilised state; but she took it for granted, insistently,
+with a small private flare of passion, because
+the one thing she could think of to do for him was
+to show him how she eased him off. She would
+really, tired and nervous, have been much disconcerted,
+were it not that the opportunity in question
+had saved her. It was what had saved her most,
+what had made her, after the first few seconds,
+almost as brave for Kate as Kate was for her, had
+made her only ask herself what their friend would
+like of her. That he was at the end of three minutes,
+without the least complicated reference, so
+smoothly "their" friend was just the effect of their
+all being sublimely civilised. The flash in which he
+saw this was, for Milly, fairly inspiring&mdash;to that
+degree in fact that she was even now, on such a
+plane, yearning to be supreme. It took, no doubt,
+a big dose of inspiration to treat as not funny&mdash;or
+at least as not unpleasant&mdash;the anomaly, for Kate,
+that <i>she</i> knew their gentleman, and for herself, that
+Kate was spending the morning with him; but
+everything continued to make for this after Milly
+had tasted of her draught. She was to wonder in
+subsequent reflection what in the world they had
+actually said, since they had made such a success of
+what they didn't say; the sweetness of the draught
+for the time, at any rate, was to feel success assured.
+What depended on this for Mr. Densher was all obscurity
+to her, and she perhaps but invented the
+image of his need as a short cut to service. Whatever
+were the facts, their perfect manners, all round,
+saw them through. The finest part of Milly's own
+inspiration, it may further be mentioned, was the
+quick perception that what would be of most service
+was, so to speak, her own native wood-note. She
+had long been conscious with shame for her thin
+blood, or at least for her poor economy, of her unused
+margin as an American girl&mdash;closely indeed as,
+in English air, the text might appear to cover the
+page. She still had reserves of spontaneity, if not
+of comicality; so that all this cash in hand could now
+find employment. She became as spontaneous as
+possible and as American as it might conveniently
+appeal to Mr. Densher, after his travels, to find her.
+She said things in the air, and yet flattered herself
+that she struck him as saying them not in the tone
+of agitation but in the tone of New York. In the
+tone of New York agitation was beautifully discounted,
+and she had now a sufficient view of how
+much it might accordingly help her.
+</p><p>
+The help was fairly rendered before they left the
+place; when her friends presently accepted her invitation
+to adjourn with her to luncheon at her hotel,
+it was in the Fifth Avenue that the meal might have
+waited. Kate had never been there so straight, but
+Milly was at present taking her; and if Mr. Densher
+had been he had at least never had to come so fast.
+She proposed it as the natural thing&mdash;proposed it
+as the American girl; and she saw herself quickly
+justified by the pace at which she was followed.
+The beauty of the case was that to do it all she had
+only to appear to take Kate's hint. This had said,
+in its fine first smile, "Oh yes, our look is queer&mdash;but
+give me time;" and the American girl could give
+time as nobody else could. What Milly thus gave
+she therefore made them take&mdash;even if, as they
+might surmise, it was rather more than they wanted.
+In the porch of the museum she expressed her preference
+for a four-wheeler; they would take their
+course in that guise precisely to multiply the minutes.
+She was more than ever justified by the positive
+charm that her spirit imparted even to their use of
+this conveyance; and she touched her highest point&mdash;that
+is, certainly, for herself&mdash;as she ushered her
+companions into the presence of Susie. Susie was
+there with luncheon, with her return, in prospect;
+and nothing could now have filled her own consciousness
+more to the brim than to see this good friend
+take in how little she was abjectly anxious. The
+cup itself actually offered to this good friend might
+in truth well be startling, for it was composed beyond
+question of ingredients oddly mixed. She caught
+Susie fairly looking at her as if to know whether
+she had brought in guests to hear Sir Luke Strett's
+report. Well, it was better her companion should
+have too much than too little to wonder about; she
+had come out "anyway," as they said at home, for
+the interest of the thing; and interest truly sat in
+her eyes. Milly was none the less, at the sharpest
+crisis, a little sorry for her; she could of necessity
+extract from the odd scene so comparatively little of
+a soothing secret. She saw Mr. Densher suddenly
+popping up, but she saw nothing else that had happened.
+She saw in the same way her young friend
+indifferent to her young friend's doom, and she
+lacked what would explain it. The only thing to
+keep her in patience was the way, after luncheon,
+Kate almost, as might be said, made up to her. This
+was actually perhaps as well what most kept Milly
+herself in patience. It had in fact for our young
+woman a positive beauty&mdash;was so marked as a deviation
+from the handsome girl's previous courses.
+Susie had been a bore to the handsome girl, and the
+change was now suggestive. The two sat together,
+after they had risen from table, in the apartment in
+which they had lunched, making it thus easy for the
+other guest and his entertainer to sit in the room adjacent.
+This, for the latter personage, was the
+beauty; it was almost, on Kate's part, like a prayer
+to be relieved. If she honestly liked better to be
+"thrown with" Susan Shepherd than with their
+other friend, why that said practically everything.
+It didn't perhaps altogether say why she had gone
+out with him for the morning, but it said, as one
+thought, about as much as she could say to his face.
+</p><p>
+Little by little indeed, under the vividness of
+Kate's behaviour, the probabilities fell back into
+their order. Merton Densher was in love, and Kate
+couldn't help it&mdash;could only be sorry and kind:
+wouldn't that, without wild flurries, cover everything?
+Milly at all events tried it as a cover, tried
+it hard, for the time; pulled it over her, in the front,
+the larger room, drew it up to her chin with energy.
+If it didn't, so treated, do everything for her, it did
+so much that she could herself supply the rest. She
+made that up by the interest of her great question,
+the question of whether, seeing him once more, with
+all that, as she called it to herself, had come and
+gone, her impression of him would be different from
+the impression received in New York. That had
+held her from the moment of their leaving the
+museum; it kept her company through their drive
+and during luncheon; and now that she was a quarter
+of an hour alone with him it became acute. She
+was to feel at this crisis that no clear, no common
+answer, no direct satisfaction on this point, was
+to reach her; she was to see her question itself simply
+go to pieces. She couldn't tell if he were different
+or not, and she didn't know nor care if <i>she</i> were:
+these things had ceased to matter in the light of the
+only thing she did know. This was that she liked
+him, as she put it to herself, as much as ever; and
+if that were to amount to liking a new person the
+amusement would be but the greater. She had
+thought him at first very quiet, in spite of recovery
+from his original confusion; though even the shade
+of bewilderment, she yet perceived, had not been due
+to such vagueness on the subject of her reintensified
+identity as the probable sight, over there, of many
+thousands of her kind would sufficiently have justified.
+No, he was quiet, inevitably, for the first half
+of the time, because Milly's own lively line&mdash;the line
+of spontaneity&mdash;made everything else relative; and
+because too, so far as Kate was spontaneous, it was
+ever so finely in the air among them that the normal
+pitch must be kept. Afterwards, when they had got
+a little more used, as it were, to each other's separate
+felicity, he had begun to talk more, clearly bethought
+himself, at a given moment, of what <i>his</i> natural lively
+line would be. It would be to take for granted
+she must wish to hear of the States, and to give her,
+in its order, everything he had seen and done there.
+He abounded, of a sudden he almost insisted; he
+returned, after breaks, to the charge; and the effect
+was perhaps the more odd as he gave no clue whatever
+to what he had admired, as he went, or to what
+he hadn't. He simply drenched her with his sociable
+story&mdash;especially during the time they were away
+from the others. She had stopped then being American&mdash;all
+to let him be English; a permission of
+which he took, she could feel, both immense and unconscious
+advantage. She had really never cared
+less for the "States" than at this moment; but that
+had nothing to do with the matter. It would have
+been the occasion of her life to learn about them, for
+nothing could put him off, and he ventured on no
+reference to what had happened for herself. It
+might have been almost as if he had known that the
+greatest of all these adventures was her doing just
+what she did then.
+</p><p>
+It was at this point that she saw the smash of her
+great question as complete, saw that all she had to
+do with was the sense of being there with him. And
+there was no chill for this in what she also presently
+saw&mdash;that, however he had begun, he was now acting
+from a particular desire, determined either by
+new facts or new fancies, to be like everyone else,
+simplifyingly "kind" to her. He had caught on
+already as to manner&mdash;fallen into line with everyone
+else; and if his spirits verily <i>had</i> gone up it might
+well be that he had thus felt himself lighting on the
+remedy for all awkwardness. Whatever he did or
+he didn't, Milly knew she should still like him&mdash;there
+was no alternative to that; but her heart could none
+the less sink a little on feeling how much his view
+of her was destined to have in common with&mdash;as she
+now sighed over it&mdash;<i>the</i> view. She could have
+dreamed of his not having <i>the</i> view, of his having
+something or other, if need be quite viewless, of his
+own; but he might have what he could with least
+trouble, and <i>the</i> view wouldn't be, after all, a positive
+bar to her seeing him. The defect of it in general&mdash;if
+she might so ungraciously criticise&mdash;was that, by
+its sweet universality, it made relations rather prosaically
+a matter of course. It anticipated and superseded
+the&mdash;likewise sweet&mdash;operation of real
+affinities. It was this that was doubtless marked in
+her power to keep him now&mdash;this and her glassy lustre
+of attention to his pleasantness about the scenery
+in the Rockies. She was in truth a little measuring
+her success in detaining him by Kate's success in
+"standing" Susan. It would not be, if she could
+help it, Mr. Densher who should first break down.
+Such at least was one of the forms of the girl's inward
+tension; but beneath even this deep reason was
+a motive still finer. What she had left at home on
+going out to give it a chance was meanwhile still,
+was more sharply and actively, there. What had
+been at the top of her mind about it and then been
+violently pushed down&mdash;this quantity was again
+working up. As soon as their friends should go
+Susie would break out, and what she would break
+out upon wouldn't be&mdash;interested in that gentleman
+as she had more than once shown herself&mdash;the personal
+fact of Mr. Densher. Milly had found in her
+face at luncheon a feverish glitter, and it told what
+she was full of. She didn't care now for Mr. Densher's
+personal fact. Mr. Densher had risen before
+her only to find his proper place in her imagination
+already, of a sudden, occupied. His personal fact
+failed, so far as she was concerned, to be personal,
+and her companion noted the failure. This could
+only mean that she was full to the brim, of Sir Luke
+Strett, and of what she had had from him. What
+<i>had</i> she had from him? It was indeed now working
+upward again that Milly would do well to know,
+though knowledge looked stiff in the light of Susie's
+glitter. It was therefore, on the whole, because
+Densher's young hostess was divided from it by so
+thin a partition that she continued to cling to the
+Rockies.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2, by 
+Henry James
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+</body>
+</html>
diff --git a/29452.txt b/29452.txt
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+++ b/29452.txt
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+Project Gutenberg's The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2, by Henry James
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2
+
+Author: Henry James
+
+Release Date: July 19, 2009 [EBook #29452]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WINGS OF THE DOVE, VOL 1 OF 2 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
+
+BY HENRY JAMES
+
+
+VOLUME I
+
+
+NEW YORK
+
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+1902
+
+
+Copyright, 1902, by
+
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+----
+
+Published, August, 1902
+
+
+
+TROW DIRECTORY
+
+PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
+
+NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FIRST
+
+
+
+
+THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+
+She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her
+unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in
+the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation
+that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him.
+It was at this point, however, that she remained; changing her place,
+moving from the shabby sofa to the armchair upholstered in a glazed
+cloth that gave at once--she had tried it--the sense of the slippery
+and of the sticky. She had looked at the sallow prints on the walls and
+at the lonely magazine, a year old, that combined, with a small lamp in
+coloured glass and a knitted white centre-piece wanting in freshness,
+to enhance the effect of the purplish cloth on the principal table; she
+had above all, from time to time, taken a brief stand on the small
+balcony to which the pair of long windows gave access. The vulgar
+little street, in this view, offered scant relief from the vulgar
+little room; its main office was to suggest to her that the narrow
+black house-fronts, adjusted to a standard that would have been low
+even for backs, constituted quite the publicity implied by such
+privacies. One felt them in the room exactly as one felt the room--the
+hundred like it or worse--in the street. Each time she turned in again,
+each time, in her impatience, she gave him up, it was to sound to a
+deeper depth, while she tasted the faint, flat emanation of things, the
+failure of fortune and of honour. If she continued to wait it was
+really, in a manner, that she might not add the shame of fear, of
+individual, personal collapse, to all the other shames. To feel the
+street, to feel the room, to feel the table-cloth and the centre-piece
+and the lamp, gave her a small, salutary sense, at least, of neither
+shirking nor lying. 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?
+
+Her father's life, her sister's, her own, that of her two lost
+brothers--the whole history of their house had the effect of some fine
+florid, voluminous phrase, say even a musical, that dropped first into
+words, into notes, without sense, and then, hanging unfinished, into no
+words, no notes at all. Why should a set of people have been put in
+motion, on such a scale and with such an air of being equipped for a
+profitable journey, only to break down without an accident, to stretch
+themselves in the wayside dust without a reason? The answer to these
+questions was not in Chirk Street, but the questions themselves
+bristled there, and the girl's repeated pause before the mirror and the
+chimney-place might have represented her nearest approach to an escape
+from them. Was it not in fact the partial escape from this "worst" in
+which she was steeped to be able to make herself out again as agreeable
+to see? She stared into the tarnished glass too hard indeed to be
+staring at her beauty alone. She readjusted the poise of her black,
+closely-feathered hat; retouched, beneath it, the thick fall of her
+dusky hair; kept her eyes, aslant, no less on her beautiful averted
+than on her beautiful presented oval. She was dressed altogether in
+black, which gave an even tone, by contrast, to her clear face and made
+her hair more harmoniously dark. Outside, on the balcony, her eyes
+showed as blue; within, at the mirror, they showed almost as black. She
+was handsome, but the degree of it was not sustained by items and aids;
+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.
+More "dressed," often, with fewer accessories, than other women, or
+less dressed, should occasion require, with more, she probably could
+not have given the key to these felicities. They were mysteries of
+which her friends were conscious--those friends whose general
+explanation was to say that she was clever, whether or no it were taken
+by the world as the cause or as the effect of her charm. If she saw
+more things than her fine face in the dull glass of her father's
+lodgings, she might have seen that, after all, she was not herself a
+fact in the collapse. She didn't judge herself cheap, she didn't make
+for misery. Personally, at least, she was not chalk-marked for the
+auction. She hadn't given up yet, and the broken sentence, if she was
+the last word, would end with a sort of meaning. There was a minute
+during which, though her eyes were fixed, she quite visibly lost
+herself in the thought of the way she might still pull things round had
+she only been a man. It was the name, above all, she would take in
+hand--the precious name she so liked and that, in spite of the harm her
+wretched father had done it, was not yet past praying for. She loved it
+in fact the more tenderly for that bleeding wound. But what could a
+penniless girl do with it but let it go?
+
+When her father at last appeared she became, as usual, instantly aware
+of the futility of any effort to hold him to anything. He had written
+her that he was ill, too ill to leave his room, and that he must see
+her without delay; and if this had been, as was probable, the sketch of
+a design, he was indifferent even to the moderate finish required for
+deception. He had clearly wanted, for perversities that he called
+reasons, to see her, just as she herself had sharpened for a talk; but
+she now again felt, in the inevitability of the freedom he used with
+her, all the old ache, her poor mother's very own, that he couldn't
+touch you ever so lightly without setting up. No relation with him
+could be so short or so superficial as not to be somehow to your hurt;
+and this, in the strangest way in the world, not because he desired it
+to be--feeling often, as he surely must, the profit for him of its not
+being--but because there was never a mistake for you that he could
+leave unmade or a conviction of his impossibility in you that he could
+approach you without strengthening. He might have awaited her on the
+sofa in his sitting-room, or might have stayed in bed and received her
+in that situation. She was glad to be spared the sight of such
+_penetralia,_ but it would have reminded her a little less that there
+was no truth in him. 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. Just so he even might die, but Kate fairly
+wondered on what evidence of his own she would some day have to believe
+it.
+
+He had not at present come down from his room, which she knew to be
+above the one they were in: he had already been out of the house,
+though he would either, should she challenge him, deny it or present it
+as a proof of his extremity. She had, however, by this time, quite
+ceased to challenge him; not only, face to face with him, vain
+irritation dropped, but he breathed upon the tragic consciousness in
+such a way that after a moment nothing of it was left. The difficulty
+was not less that he breathed in the same way upon the comic: she
+almost believed that with this latter she might still have found a
+foothold for clinging to him. He had ceased to be amusing--he was
+really too inhuman. His perfect look, which had floated him so long,
+was practically perfect still; but one had long since for every
+occasion taken it for granted. Nothing could have better shown than the
+actual how right one had been. He looked exactly as much as usual--all
+pink and silver as to skin and hair, all straitness and starch as to
+figure and dress--the man in the world least connected with anything
+unpleasant. He was so particularly the English gentleman and the
+fortunate, settled, normal person. Seen at a foreign _table d'hote,_
+he suggested but one thing: "In what perfection England produces them!"
+He had kind, safe eyes, and a voice which, for all its clean fulness,
+told, in a manner, the happy history of its having never had once to
+raise itself. Life had met him so, half-way, 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. For a minute after he came in it was as if the place
+were her own and he the visitor with susceptibilities. He gave you
+funny feelings, he had indescribable arts, that quite turned the
+tables: that had been always how he came to see her mother so long as
+her mother would see him. He came from places they had often not known
+about, but he patronised Lexham Gardens. Kate's only actual expression
+of impatience, however, was "I'm glad you're so much better!"
+
+"I'm not so much better, my dear--I'm exceedingly unwell; the proof of
+which is, precisely, that I've been out to the chemist's--that beastly
+fellow at the corner." So Mr. Croy showed he could qualify the humble
+hand that assuaged him. "I'm taking something he has made up for me.
+It's just why I've sent for you--that you may see me as I really am."
+
+"Oh papa, it's long since I've ceased to see you otherwise than as you
+really are! I think we've all arrived by this time at the right word
+for that: 'You're beautiful--_n'en parlons plus.'_ You're as beautiful
+as ever--you look lovely." He judged meanwhile her own appearance, as
+she knew she could always trust him to do; recognising, estimating,
+sometimes disapproving, what she wore, showing her the interest he
+continued to take in her. He might really take none at all, yet she
+virtually knew herself the creature in the world to whom he was least
+indifferent. She had often enough wondered what on earth, at the pass
+he had reached, could give him pleasure, and she had come back, on
+these occasions, to that. It gave him pleasure that she was handsome,
+that she was, in her way, a sensible value. It was at least as marked,
+nevertheless, that he derived none from similar conditions, so far as
+they _were_ similar, in his other child. Poor Marian might be handsome,
+but he certainly didn't care. The hitch here, of course, was that, with
+whatever beauty, her sister, widowed and almost in want, with four
+bouncing children, was not a sensible value. She asked him, the next
+thing, how long he had been in his actual quarters, though aware of how
+little it mattered, how little any answer he might make would probably
+have in common with the truth. She failed in fact to notice his answer,
+truthful or not, already occupied as she was with what she had on her
+own side to say to him. This was really what had made her wait--what
+superseded the small remainder of her resentment at his constant
+practical impertinence; the result of all of which was that, within a
+minute, she had brought it out. "Yes--even now I'm willing to go with
+you. I don't know what you may have wished to say to me, and even if
+you hadn't written you would within a day or two have heard from me.
+Things have happened, and I've only waited, for seeing you, till I
+should be quite sure. I _am_ quite sure. I'll go with you."
+
+It produced an effect. "Go with me where?"
+
+"Anywhere. I'll stay with you. Even here." She had taken off her gloves
+and, as if she had arrived with her plan, she sat down.
+
+Lionel Croy hung about in his disengaged way--hovered there as if, in
+consequence of her words, looking for a pretext to back out easily: on
+which she immediately saw she had discounted, as it might be called,
+what he had himself been preparing. He wished her not to come to him,
+still less to settle with him, and had sent for her to give her up with
+some style and state; a part of the beauty of which, however, was to
+have been his sacrifice to her own detachment. There was no style, no
+state, unless she wished to forsake him. His idea had accordingly been
+to surrender her to her wish with all nobleness; it had by no means
+been to have positively to keep her off. She cared, however, not a
+straw for his embarrassment--feeling how little, on her own part, she
+was moved by charity. She had seen him, first and last, in so many
+attitudes that she could now deprive him quite without compunction of
+the luxury of a new one. Yet she felt the disconcerted gasp in his tone
+as he said: "Oh my child, I can never consent to that!"
+
+"What then are you going to do?"
+
+"I'm turning it over," said Lionel Croy. "You may imagine if I'm not
+thinking."
+
+"Haven't you thought then," his daughter asked, "of what I speak of? I
+mean of my being ready."
+
+Standing before her with his hands behind him and his legs a little
+apart, he swayed slightly to and fro, inclined toward her as if rising
+on his toes. It had an effect of conscientious deliberation. "No. I
+haven't. I couldn't. I wouldn't." It was so respectable, a show that
+she felt afresh, and with the memory of their old despair, the despair
+at home, how little his appearance ever by any chance told about him.
+His plausibility had been the heaviest of her mother's crosses;
+inevitably so much more present to the world than whatever it was that
+was horrid--thank God they didn't really know!--that he had done. He
+had positively been, in his way, by the force of his particular type, a
+terrible husband not to live with; his type reflecting so invidiously
+on the woman who had found him distasteful. Had this thereby not kept
+directly present to Kate herself that it might, on some sides, prove no
+light thing for her to leave uncompanioned a parent with such a face
+and such a manner? Yet if there was much she neither knew nor dreamed
+of, it passed between them at this very moment that he was quite
+familiar with himself as the subject of such quandaries. If he
+recognised his younger daughter's happy aspect as a sensible value, he
+had from the first still more exactly appraised his own. The great
+wonder was not that in spite of everything his own had helped him; the
+great wonder was that it hadn't helped him more. However, it was, to
+its old, eternal, recurrent tune, helping him all the while; her drop
+into patience with him showed how it was helping him at this moment.
+She saw the next instant precisely the line he would take. "Do you
+really ask me to believe you've been making up your mind to that?"
+
+She had to consider her own line. "I don't think I care, papa, what you
+believe. I never, for that matter, think of you as believing anything;
+hardly more," she permitted herself to add, "than I ever think of you
+as yourself believed. I don't know you, father, you see."
+
+"And it's your idea that you may make that up?"
+
+"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."
+
+"I don't get on," Mr. Croy almost gaily replied.
+
+His daughter took in the place again, and it might well have seemed odd
+that in so little to meet the eye there should be so much to show. What
+showed was the ugliness--so positive and palpable that it was somehow
+sustaining. It was a medium, a setting, and to that extent, after all,
+a dreadful sign of life; so that it fairly put a point into her answer.
+"Oh, I beg your pardon. You flourish."
+
+"Do you throw it up at me again," he pleasantly inquired, "that I've
+not made away with myself?"
+
+She treated the question as needing no reply; she sat there for real
+things. "You know how all our anxieties, under mamma's will, have come
+out. She had still less to leave than she feared. We don't know how we
+lived. It all makes up about two hundred a year for Marian, and two for
+me, but I give up a hundred to Marian."
+
+"Oh, you weak thing!" her father kindly sighed.
+
+"For you and me together," she went on, "the other hundred would do
+something."
+
+"And what would do the rest?"
+
+"Can you yourself do nothing?" He gave her a look; then, slipping his
+hands into his pockets and turning away, stood for a little at the
+window she had left open. She said nothing more--she had placed him
+there with that question, and the silence lasted a minute, broken by
+the call of an appealing costermonger, which came in with the mild
+March air, with the shabby sunshine, fearfully unbecoming to the room,
+and with the small homely hum of Chirk Street. Presently he moved
+nearer, but as if her question had quite dropped. "I don't see what has
+so suddenly wound you up."
+
+"I should have thought you might perhaps guess. Let me at any rate tell
+you. Aunt Maud has made me a proposal. But she has also made me a
+condition. She wants to keep me."
+
+"And what in the world else _could_ she possibly want?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know--many things. I'm not so precious a capture," the
+girl a little dryly explained. "No one has ever wanted to keep me
+before."
+
+Looking always what was proper, her father looked now still more
+surprised than interested. "You've not had proposals?" He spoke as if
+that were incredible of Lionel Croy's daughter; as if indeed such an
+admission scarce consorted, even in filial intimacy, with her high
+spirit and general form.
+
+"Not from rich relations. She's extremely kind to me, but it's time,
+she says, that we should understand each other."
+
+Mr. Croy fully assented. "Of course it is--high time; and I can quite
+imagine what she means by it."
+
+"Are you very sure?"
+
+"Oh, perfectly. She means that she'll 'do' for you handsomely if you'll
+break off all relations with me. You speak of her condition. Her
+condition's of course that."
+
+"Well then," said Kate, "it's what has wound me up. Here I am."
+
+He showed with a gesture how thoroughly he had taken it in; after
+which, within a few seconds, he had, quite congruously, turned the
+situation about. "Do you really suppose me in a position to justify
+your throwing yourself upon me?"
+
+She waited a little, but when she spoke it was clear. "Yes."
+
+"Well then, you're a bigger fool than I should have ventured to suppose
+you."
+
+"Why so? You live. You flourish. You bloom."
+
+"Ah, how you've all always hated me!" he murmured with a pensive gaze
+again at the window.
+
+"No one could be less of a mere cherished memory," she declared as if
+she had not heard him. "You're an actual person, if there ever was one.
+We agreed just now that you're beautiful. You strike me, you know,
+as--in your own way--much more firm on your feet than I am. Don't put
+it to me therefore as monstrous that the fact that we are, after all,
+parent and child should at present in some manner count for us. My idea
+has been that it should have some effect for each of us. I don't at
+all, as I told you just now," she pursued, "make out your life; but
+whatever it is I hereby offer you to accept it. And, on my side, I'll
+do everything I can for you."
+
+"I see," said Lionel Croy. Then, with the sound of extreme relevance,
+"And what _can_ you?" She only, at this, hesitated, and he took up her
+silence. "You can describe yourself--_to_ yourself--as, in a fine
+flight, giving up your aunt for me; but what good, I should like to
+know, would your fine flight do me?" As she still said nothing he
+developed a little. "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." She rose now, as if in sight of the term of her
+effort, in sight of the futility and the weariness of many things, and
+moved back to the poor little glass with which she had communed before.
+She retouched here again the poise of her hat, and this brought to her
+father's lips another remark in which impatience, however, had already
+been replaced by a funny flare of appreciation. "Oh, you're all right!
+Don't muddle yourself up with _me!"_
+
+His daughter turned round to him. "The condition Aunt Maud makes is
+that I shall have absolutely nothing to do with you; never see you, nor
+speak, nor write to you, never go near you nor make you a sign, nor
+hold any sort of communication with you. What she requires is that you
+shall simply cease to exist for me."
+
+He had always seemed--it was one of the marks of what they called the
+"unspeakable" in him--to walk a little more on his toes, as if for
+jauntiness, in the presence of offence. Nothing, however, was more
+wonderful than what he sometimes would take for offence, unless it
+might be what he sometimes wouldn't. He walked at any rate on his toes
+now. "A very proper requirement of your Aunt Maud, my dear--I don't
+hesitate to say it!" Yet as this, much as she had seen, left her silent
+at first from what might have been a sense of sickness, he had time to
+go on: "That's her condition then. But what are her promises? Just what
+does she engage to do? You must work it, you know."
+
+"You mean make her feel," Kate asked after a moment, "how much I'm
+attached to you?"
+
+"Well, what a cruel, invidious treaty it is for you to sign. I'm a poor
+old dad to make a stand about giving up--I quite agree. But I'm not,
+after all, quite the old dad not to get something _for_ giving up."
+
+"Oh, I think her idea," said Kate almost gaily now, "is that I shall
+get a great deal."
+
+He met her with his inimitable amenity. "But does she give you the
+items?"
+
+The girl went through the show. "More or less, I think. But many of
+them are things I dare say I may take for granted--things women can do
+for each other and that you wouldn't understand."
+
+"There's nothing I understand so well, always, as the things I needn't!
+But what I want to do, you see," he went on, "is to put it to your
+conscience that you've an admirable opportunity; and that it's moreover
+one for which, after all, damn you, you've really to thank _me."_
+
+"I confess I don't see," Kate observed, "what my 'conscience' has to do
+with it."
+
+"Then, my dear girl, you ought simply to be ashamed of yourself. Do you
+know what you're a proof of, all you hard, hollow people together?" He
+put the question with a charming air of sudden spiritual heat. "Of the
+deplorably superficial morality of the age. The family sentiment, in
+our vulgarised, brutalised life, has gone utterly to pot. There was a
+day when a man like me--by which I mean a parent like me--would have
+been for a daughter like you a quite distinct value; what's called in
+the business world, I believe, an 'asset.'" He continued sociably to
+make it out. "I'm not talking only of what you might, with the right
+feeling do _for_ me, but of what you might--it's what I call your
+opportunity--do _with_ me. Unless indeed," he the next moment
+imperturbably threw off, "they come a good deal to the same thing. Your
+duty as well as your chance, if you're capable of seeing it, is to use
+me. Show family feeling by seeing what I'm good for. If you had it as
+_I_ have it you'd see I'm still good--well, for a lot of things.
+There's in fact, my dear," Mr. Croy wound up, "a coach-and-four to be
+got out of me." His drop, or rather his climax, failed a little of
+effect, indeed, through an undue precipitation of memory. Something his
+daughter had said came back to him. "You've settled to give away half
+your little inheritance?"
+
+Her hesitation broke into laughter. "No--I haven't 'settled' anything."
+
+"But you mean, practically, to let Marian collar it?" They stood there
+face to face, but she so denied herself to his challenge that he could
+only go on. "You've a view of three hundred a year for her in addition
+to what her husband left her with? Is _that,"_ the remote progenitor of
+such wantonness audibly wondered, "your morality?"
+
+Kate found her answer without trouble. "Is it your idea that I should
+give you everything?"
+
+The "everything" clearly struck him--to the point even of determining
+the tone of his reply. "Far from it. How can you ask that when I refuse
+what you tell me you came to offer? Make of my idea what you can; I
+think I've sufficiently expressed it, and it's at any rate to take or
+to leave. It's the only one, I may nevertheless add; it's the basket
+with all my eggs. It's my conception, in short, of your duty."
+
+The girl's tired smile watched the word as if it had taken on a small
+grotesque visibility. "You're wonderful on such subjects! I think I
+should leave you in no doubt," she pursued, "that if I were to sign my
+aunt's agreement I should carry it out, in honour, to the letter."
+
+"Rather, my own love! It's just your honour that I appeal to. The only
+way to play the game _is_ to play it. There's no limit to what your
+aunt can do for you."
+
+"Do you mean in the way of marrying me?"
+
+"What else should I mean? Marry properly----"
+
+"And then?" Kate asked as he hung fire.
+
+"And then--well, I _will_ talk with you. I'll resume relations."
+
+She looked about her and picked up her parasol. "Because you're not so
+afraid of any one else in the world as you are of _her?_ My husband, if
+I should marry, would be, at the worst, less of a terror? If that's
+what you mean, there may be something in it. But doesn't it depend a
+little also on what you mean by my getting a proper one? However," Kate
+added as she picked out the frill of her little umbrella, "I don't
+suppose your idea of him is _quite_ that he should persuade you to live
+with us."
+
+"Dear no--not a bit." He spoke as not resenting either the fear or the
+hope she imputed; met both imputations, in fact, with a sort of
+intellectual relief. "I place the case for you wholly in your aunt's
+hands. I take her view, with my eyes shut; I accept in all confidence
+any man she selects. If he's good enough for _her_--elephantine snob as
+she is--he's good enough for me; and quite in spite of the fact that
+she'll be sure to select one who can be trusted to be nasty to me. My
+only interest is in your doing what she wants. You shan't be so beastly
+poor, my darling," Mr. Croy declared, "if I can help it."
+
+"Well then, good-bye, papa," the girl said after a reflection on this
+that had perceptibly ended for her in a renunciation of further debate.
+"Of course you understand that it may be for long."
+
+Her companion, hereupon, had one of his finest inspirations. "Why not,
+frankly, for ever? You must do me the justice to see that I don't do
+things, that I've never done them, by halves--that if I offer you to
+efface myself, it's for the final, fatal sponge that I ask, well
+saturated and well applied."
+
+She turned her handsome, quiet face upon him at such length that it
+might well have been for the last time. "I don't know what you're like."
+
+"No more do I, my dear. I've spent my life in trying, in vain, to
+discover. Like nothing--more's the pity. If there had been many of us,
+and we could have found each other out, there's no knowing what we
+mightn't have done. But it doesn't matter now. Good-bye, love." He
+looked even not sure of what she would wish him to suppose on the
+subject of a kiss, yet also not embarrassed by his uncertainty.
+
+She forbore in fact for a moment longer to clear it up. "I wish there
+were some one here who might serve--for any contingency--as a witness
+that I _have_ put it to you that I'm ready to come."
+
+"Would you like me," her father asked, "to call the landlady?"
+
+"You may not believe me," she pursued, "but I came really hoping you
+might have found some way. I'm very sorry, at all events, to leave you
+unwell." He turned away from her, on this, and, as he had done before,
+took refuge, by the window, in a stare at the street. "Let me put
+it--unfortunately without a witness," she added after a moment, "that
+there's only one word you really need speak."
+
+When he took this up it was still with his back to her. "If I don't
+strike you as having already spoken it, our time has been singularly
+wasted."
+
+"I'll engage with you in respect to my aunt exactly to what she wants
+of me in respect to you. She wants me to choose. Very well, I _will_
+choose. I'll wash my hands of her for you to just that tune."
+
+He at last brought himself round. "Do you know, dear, you make me sick?
+I've tried to be clear, and it isn't fair."
+
+But she passed this over; she was too visibly sincere. "Father!"
+
+"I don't quite see what's the matter with you," he said, "and if you
+can't pull yourself together I'll--upon my honour--take you in hand.
+Put you into a cab and deliver you again safe at Lancaster Gate."
+
+She was really absent, distant. "Father."
+
+It was too much, and he met it sharply. "Well?"
+
+"Strange as it may be to you to hear me say it, there's a good you can
+do me and a help you can render."
+
+"Isn't it then exactly what I've been trying to make you feel?"
+
+"Yes," she answered patiently, "but so in the wrong way. I'm perfectly
+honest in what I say, and I know what I'm talking about. It isn't that
+I'll pretend I could have believed a month ago in anything to call aid
+or support from you. The case is changed--that's what has happened; my
+difficulty's a new one. But even now it's not a question of anything I
+should ask you in a way to 'do.' It's simply a question of your not
+turning me away--taking yourself out of my life. It's simply a question
+of your saying: 'Yes then, since you will, we'll stand together. We
+won't worry in advance about how or where; we'll have a faith and find
+a way.' That's all--_that_ would be the good you'd do me. I should
+_have_ you, and it would be for my benefit. Do you see?"
+
+If he didn't it was not for want of looking at her hard. "The matter
+with you is that you're in love, and that your aunt knows and--for
+reasons, I'm sure, perfect--hates and opposes it. Well she may! It's a
+matter in which I trust her with my eyes shut. Go, please." Though he
+spoke not in anger--rather in infinite sadness--he fairly turned her
+out. Before she took it up he had, as the fullest expression of what he
+felt, opened the door of the room. He had fairly, in his deep
+disapproval, a generous compassion to spare. "I'm sorry for her,
+deluded woman, if she builds on you."
+
+Kate stood a moment in the draught. "She's not the person _I_ pity
+most, for, deluded in many ways though she may be, she's not the person
+who's most so. I mean," she explained, "if it's a question of what you
+call building on me."
+
+He took it as if what she meant might be other than her description of
+it. "You're deceiving _two_ persons then, Mrs. Lowder and somebody
+else?"
+
+She shook her head with detachment. "I've no intention of that sort
+with respect to any one now--to Mrs. Lowder least of all. If you fail
+me"--she seemed to make it out for herself--"that has the merit at
+least that it simplifies. I shall go my way--as I see my way."
+
+"Your way, you mean then, will be to marry some blackguard without a
+penny?"
+
+"You ask a great deal of satisfaction," she observed, "for the little
+you give."
+
+It brought him up again before her as with a sense that she was not to
+be hustled; and, though he glared at her a little, this had long been
+the practical limit to his general power of objection. "If you're base
+enough to incur your aunt's disgust, you're base enough for my
+argument. What, if you're not thinking of an utterly improper person,
+do your speeches to me signify? Who _is_ the beggarly sneak?" he
+demanded as her response failed. Her response, when it came, was cold
+but distinct. "He has every disposition to make the best of you. He
+only wants in fact to be kind to you."
+
+"Then he _must_ be an ass! And how in the world can you consider it to
+improve him for me," her father pursued, "that he's also destitute and
+impossible? There are asses and asses, even--the right and the
+wrong--and you appear to have carefully picked out one of the wrong.
+Your aunt knows _them,_ by good fortune; I perfectly trust, as I tell
+you, her judgment for them; and you may take it from me once for all
+that I won't hear of any one of whom _she_ won't." Which led up to his
+last word. "If you should really defy us both----!"
+
+"Well, papa?"
+
+"Well, my sweet child, I think that--reduced to insignificance as you
+may fondly believe me--I should still not be quite without some way of
+making you regret it."
+
+She had a pause, a grave one, but not, as appeared, that she might
+measure this danger. "If I shouldn't do it, you know, it wouldn't be
+because I'm afraid of you."
+
+"Oh, if you don't do it," he retorted, "you may be as bold as you like!"
+
+"Then you can do nothing at all for me?"
+
+He showed her, this time unmistakably--it was before her there on the
+landing, at the top of the tortuous stairs and in the midst of the
+strange smell that seemed to cling to them--how vain her appeal
+remained. "I've never pretended to do more than my duty; I've given you
+the best and the clearest advice." And then came up the spring that
+moved him. "If it only displeases you, you can go to Marian to be
+consoled." What he couldn't forgive was her dividing with Marian her
+scant share of the provision their mother had been able to leave them.
+She should have divided it with _him._
+
+
+II
+
+She had gone to Mrs. Lowder on her mother's death--gone with an effort
+the strain and pain of which made her at present, as she recalled them,
+reflect on the long way she had travelled since then. There had been
+nothing else to do--not a penny in the other house, nothing but unpaid
+bills that had gathered thick while its mistress lay mortally ill, and
+the admonition that there was nothing she must attempt to raise money
+on, since everything belonged to the "estate." How the estate would
+turn out at best presented itself as a mystery altogether gruesome; it
+had proved, in fact, since then a residuum a trifle less scant than,
+with Marian, she had for some weeks feared; but the girl had had at the
+beginning rather a wounded sense of its being watched on behalf of
+Marian and her children. What on earth was it supposed that _she_
+wanted to do to it? She wanted in truth only to give up--to abandon her
+own interest, which she, no doubt, would already have done had not the
+point been subject to Aunt Maud's sharp intervention. Aunt Maud's
+intervention was all sharp now, and the other point, the great one, was
+that it was to be, in this light, either all put up with or all
+declined. Yet at the winter's end, nevertheless, she could scarce have
+said what stand she conceived she had taken. It wouldn't be the first
+time she had seen herself obliged to accept with smothered irony other
+people's interpretation of her conduct. She often ended by giving up to
+them--it seemed really the way to live--the version that met their
+convenience.
+
+The tall, rich, heavy house at Lancaster Gate, on the other side of the
+Park and the long South Kensington stretches, had figured to her,
+through childhood, through girlhood, as the remotest limit of her vague
+young world. It was further off and more occasional than anything else
+in the comparatively compact circle in which she revolved, and seemed,
+by a rigour early marked, to be reached through long, straight,
+discouraging vistas, which kept lengthening and straightening, whereas
+almost everything else in life was either, at the worst, round about
+Cromwell Road, or, at the furthest, in the nearer parts of Kensington
+Gardens. Mrs. Lowder was her only "real" aunt, not the wife of an
+uncle, and had been thereby, both in ancient days and when the greater
+trouble came, the person, of all persons, properly to make some sign;
+in accord with which our young woman's feeling was founded on the
+impression, quite cherished for years, that the signs made across the
+interval just mentioned had never been really in the note of the
+situation. The main office of this relative, for the young Croys--apart
+from giving them their fixed measure of social greatness--had struck
+them as being to form them to a conception of what they were not to
+expect. When Kate came to think matters over with the aid of knowledge,
+she failed quite to see how Aunt Maud could have been different--she
+had rather perceived by this time how many other things might have
+been; yet she also made out that if they had all consciously lived
+under a liability to the chill breath of _ultima Thule_ they couldn't,
+either, on the facts, very well have done less. What in the event
+appeared established was that if Mrs. Lowder had disliked them she had
+yet not disliked them so much as they supposed. It had at any rate been
+for the purpose of showing how she struggled with her aversion that she
+sometimes came to see them, that she at regular periods invited them to
+her house, and in short, as it now looked, kept them along on the terms
+that would best give her sister the perennial luxury of a grievance.
+This sister, poor Mrs. Croy, the girl knew, had always judged her
+resentfully, and had brought them up, Marian, the boys and herself, to
+the idea of a particular attitude, for signs of the practice of which
+they watched each other with awe. The attitude was to make plain to
+Aunt Maud, with the same regularity as her invitations, that they
+sufficed--thanks awfully--to themselves. But the ground of it, Kate
+lived to discern, was that this was only because _she_ didn't suffice
+to them. The little she offered was to be accepted under protest, yet
+not, really, because it was excessive. It wounded them--there was the
+rub!--because it fell short.
+
+The number of new things our young lady looked out on from the high
+south window that hung over the Park--this number was so great (though
+some of the things were only old ones altered and, as the phrase was of
+other matters, done up), that life at present turned to her view from
+week to week more and more the face of a striking and distinguished
+stranger. She had reached a great age--for it quite seemed to her that
+at twenty-five it was late to reconsider; and her most general sense
+was a shade of regret that she had not known earlier. The world was
+different--whether for worse or for better--from her rudimentary
+readings, and it gave her the feeling of a wasted past. If she had only
+known sooner she might have arranged herself more to meet it. She made,
+at all events, discoveries every day, some of which were about herself
+and others about other persons. Two of these--one under each head--more
+particularly engaged, in alternation, her anxiety. She saw as she had
+never seen before how material things spoke to her. She saw, and she
+blushed to see, that if, in contrast with some of its old aspects, life
+now affected her as a dress successfully "done up," this was exactly by
+reason of the trimmings and lace, was a matter of ribbons and silk and
+velvet. She had a dire accessibility to pleasure from such sources. She
+liked the charming quarters her aunt had assigned her--liked them
+literally more than she had in all her other days liked anything; and
+nothing could have been more uneasy than her suspicion of her
+relative's view of this truth. Her relative was prodigious--she had
+never done her relative justice. These larger conditions all tasted of
+her, from morning till night; but she was a person in respect to whom
+the growth of acquaintance could only--strange as it might seem--keep
+your heart in your mouth.
+
+The girl's second great discovery was that, so far from having been for
+Mrs. Lowder a subject of superficial consideration, the blighted home
+in Lexham Gardens had haunted her nights and her days. Kate had spent,
+all winter, hours of observation that were not less pointed for being
+spent alone; recent events, which her mourning explained, assured her a
+measure of isolation, and it was in the isolation above all that her
+neighbour's influence worked. Sitting far downstairs Aunt Maud was yet
+a presence from which a sensitive niece could feel herself extremely
+under pressure. She knew herself now, the sensitive niece, as having
+been marked from far back. She knew more than she could have told you,
+by the upstairs fire, in a whole dark December afternoon. She knew so
+much that her knowledge was what fairly kept her there, making her at
+times more endlessly between the small silk-covered sofa that stood for
+her in the firelight and the great grey map of Middlesex spread beneath
+her lookout. To go down, to forsake her refuge, was to meet some of her
+discoveries half-way, to have to face them or fly before them; whereas
+they were at such a height only like the rumble of a far-off siege
+heard in the provisioned citadel. She had almost liked, in these weeks,
+what had created her suspense and her stress: the loss of her mother,
+the submersion of her father, the discomfort of her sister, the
+confirmation of their shrunken prospects, the certainty, in especial,
+of her having to recognise that, should she behave, as she called it,
+decently--that is still do something for others--she would be herself
+wholly without supplies. She held that she had a right to sadness and
+stillness; she nursed them for their postponing power. What they mainly
+postponed was the question of a surrender--though she could not yet
+have said exactly of what: a general surrender of everything--that was
+at moments the way it presented itself--to Aunt Maud's looming
+"personality." It was by her personality that Aunt Maud was prodigious,
+and the great mass of it loomed because, in the thick, the foglike air
+of her arranged existence, there were parts doubtless magnified and
+parts certainly vague. They represented at all events alike, the dim
+and the distinct, a strong will and a high hand. It was perfectly
+present to Kate that she might be devoured, and she likened herself to
+a trembling kid, kept apart a day or two till her turn should come, but
+sure sooner or later to be introduced into the cage of the lioness.
+
+The cage was Aunt Maud's own room, her office, her counting-house, her
+battlefield, her especial scene, in fine, of action, situated on the
+ground-floor, opening from the main hall and figuring rather to our
+young woman on exit and entrance as a guard house or a toll-gate. The
+lioness waited--the kid had at least that consciousness; was aware of
+the neighbourhood of a morsel she had reason to suppose tender. She
+would have been meanwhile a wonderful lioness for a show, an
+extraordinary figure in a cage or anywhere; majestic, magnificent,
+high-coloured, all brilliant gloss, perpetual satin, twinkling bugles
+and flashing gems, with a lustre of agate eyes, a sheen of raven hair,
+a polish of complexion that was like that of well-kept china and
+that--as if the skin were too tight--told especially at curves and
+corners. Her niece had a quiet name for her--she kept it quiet;
+thinking of her, with a free fancy, as somehow typically insular, she
+talked to herself of Britannia of the Market Place--Britannia
+unmistakable, but with a pen in her ear, and felt she should not be
+happy till she might on some occasion add to the rest of the panoply a
+helmet, a shield, a trident and a ledger. It was not in truth, however,
+that the forces with which, as Kate felt, she would have to deal were
+those most suggested by an image simple and broad; she was learning,
+after all, each day, to know her companion, and what she had already
+most perceived was the mistake of trusting to easy analogies. There was
+a whole side of Britannia, the side of her florid philistinism, her
+plumes and her train, her fantastic furniture and heaving bosom, the
+false gods of her taste and false notes of her talk, the sole
+contemplation of which would be dangerously misleading. She was a
+complex and subtle Britannia, as passionate as she was practical, with
+a reticule for her prejudices as deep as that other pocket, the pocket
+full of coins stamped in her image, that the world best knew her by.
+She carried on, in short, behind her aggressive and defensive front,
+operations determined by her wisdom. It was in fact, we have hinted, as
+a besieger that our young lady, in the provisioned citadel, had for the
+present most to think of her, and what made her formidable in this
+character was that she was unscrupulous and immoral. So, at all events,
+in silent sessions and a youthful off-hand way, Kate conveniently
+pictured her: what this sufficiently represented being that her weight
+was in the scale of certain dangers--those dangers that, by our
+showing, made the younger woman linger and lurk above, while the elder,
+below, both militant and diplomatic, covered as much of the ground as
+possible. Yet what were the dangers, after all, but just the dangers of
+life and of London? Mrs. Lowder _was_ London, _was_ life--the roar of
+the siege and the thick of the fray. There were some things, after all,
+of which Britannia was afraid; but Aunt Maud was afraid of nothing--not
+even, it would appear, of arduous thought. These impressions, none the
+less, Kate kept so much to herself that she scarce shared them with
+poor Marian, the ostensible purpose of her frequent visits to whom yet
+continued to be to talk over everything. One of her reasons for holding
+off from the last concession to Aunt Maud was that she might be the
+more free to commit herself to this so much nearer and so much less
+fortunate relative, with whom Aunt Maud would have, directly, almost
+nothing to do. The sharpest pinch of her state, meanwhile, was exactly
+that all intercourse with her sister had the effect of casting down her
+courage and tying her hands, adding daily to her sense of the part, not
+always either uplifting or sweetening, that the bond of blood might
+play in one's life. She was face to face with it now, with the bond of
+blood; the consciousness of it was what she seemed most clearly to have
+"come into" by the death of her mother, much of that consciousness as
+her mother had absorbed and carried away. Her haunting, harrassing
+father, her menacing, uncompromising aunt, her portionless little
+nephews and nieces, were figures that caused the chord of natural piety
+superabundantly to vibrate. Her manner of putting it to herself--but
+more especially in respect to Marian--was that she saw what you might
+be brought to by the cultivation of consanguinity. She had taken, in
+the old days, as she supposed, the measure of this liability; those
+being the days when, as the second-born, she had thought no one in the
+world so pretty as Marian, no one so charming, so clever, so assured,
+in advance, of happiness and success. The view was different now, but
+her attitude had been obliged, for many reasons, to show as the same.
+The subject of this estimate was no longer pretty, as the reason for
+thinking her clever was no longer plain; yet, bereaved, disappointed,
+demoralised, querulous, she was all the more sharply and insistently
+Kate's elder and Kate's own. Kate's most constant feeling about her was
+that she would make her, Kate, do things; and always, in comfortless
+Chelsea, at the door of the small house the small rent of which she
+couldn't help having on her mind, she fatalistically asked herself,
+before going in, which thing it would probably be this time. She
+noticed with profundity that disappointment made people selfish; she
+marvelled at the serenity--it was the poor woman's only one--of what
+Marian took for granted: her own state of abasement as the second-born,
+her life reduced to mere inexhaustible sisterhood. She existed, in that
+view, wholly for the small house in Chelsea; 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. You
+always saw, in this case, something else than what you were, and you
+got, in consequence, none of the peace of your condition. However, as
+she never really let Marian see what she was, Marian might well not
+have been aware that she herself saw. Kate was accordingly, to her own
+vision, not a hypocrite of virtue, for she gave herself up; but she was
+a hypocrite of stupidity, for she kept to herself everything that was
+not herself. What she most kept was the particular sentiment with which
+she watched her sister instinctively neglect nothing that would make
+for her submission to their aunt; a state of the spirit that perhaps
+marked most sharply how poor you might become when you minded so much
+the absence of wealth. It was through Kate that Aunt Maud should be
+worked, and nothing mattered less than what might become of Kate in the
+process. Kate was to burn her ships, in short, so that Marian should
+profit; and Marian's desire to profit was quite oblivious of a dignity
+that had, after all, its reasons--if it had only cared for them--for
+keeping itself a little stiff. Kate, to be properly stiff for both of
+them, would therefore have had to be selfish, have had to prefer an
+ideal of behaviour--than which nothing, ever, was more selfish--to the
+possibility of stray crumbs for the four small creatures. The tale of
+Mrs. Lowder's disgust at her elder niece's marriage to Mr. Condrip had
+lost little of its point; the incredibly fatuous behaviour of Mr.
+Condrip, the parson of a dull suburban parish, with a saintly profile
+which was always in evidence, being so distinctly on record to keep
+criticism consistent. He had presented his profile on system, having,
+goodness knew, nothing else to present--nothing at all to full-face the
+world with, no imagination of the propriety of living and minding his
+business. Criticism had remained on Aunt Maud's part consistent enough;
+she was not a person to regard such proceedings as less of a mistake
+for having acquired more of the privilege of pathos. She had not been
+forgiving, and the only approach she made to overlooking them was by
+overlooking--with the surviving delinquent--the solid little phalanx
+that now represented them. Of the two sinister ceremonies that she
+lumped together, the marriage and the interment, she had been present
+at the former, just as she had sent Marian, before it, a liberal
+cheque; but this had not been for her more than the shadow of an
+admitted link with Mrs. Condrip's course. She disapproved of clamorous
+children for whom there was no prospect; she disapproved of weeping
+widows who couldn't make their errors good; and she had thus put within
+Marian's reach one of the few luxuries left when so much else had gone,
+an easy pretext for a constant grievance. Kate Croy remembered well
+what their mother, in a different quarter, had made of it; and it was
+Marian's marked failure to pluck the fruit of resentment that committed
+them, as sisters, to an almost equal fellowship in abjection. If the
+theory was that, yes, alas, one of the pair had ceased to be noticed,
+but that the other was noticed enough to make up for it, who would fail
+to see that Kate couldn't separate herself without a cruel pride? That
+lesson became sharp for our young lady the day after her interview with
+her father.
+
+"I can't imagine," Marian on this occasion said to her, "how you can
+think of anything else in the world but the horrid way we're situated."
+
+"And, pray, how do you know," Kate inquired in reply, "anything about
+my thoughts? It seems to me I give you sufficient proof of how much I
+think of _you._ I don't, really, my dear, know what else you've to do
+with!"
+
+Marian's retort, on this, was a stroke as to which she had supplied
+herself with several kinds of preparation, but there was, none the
+less, something of an unexpected note in its promptitude. She had
+foreseen her sister's general fear; but here, ominously, was the
+special one. "Well, your own business is of course your own business,
+and you may say there's no one less in a position than I to preach to
+you. But, all the same, if you wash your hands of me for ever for it, I
+won't, for this once, keep back that I don't consider you've a right,
+as we all stand, to throw yourself away."
+
+It was after the children's dinner, which was also their mother's, but
+which their aunt mostly contrived to keep from ever becoming her own
+luncheon; and the two young women were still in the presence of the
+crumpled table-cloth, the dispersed pinafores, the scraped dishes, the
+lingering odour of boiled food. Kate had asked, with ceremony, if she
+might put up a window a little, and Mrs. Condrip had replied without it
+that she might do as she liked. She often received such inquiries as if
+they reflected in a manner on the pure essence of her little ones. The
+four had retired, with much movement and noise, under imperfect control
+of the small Irish governess whom their aunt had hunted out for them
+and whose brooding resolve not to prolong so uncrowned a martyrdom she
+already more than suspected. Their mother had become for Kate--who took
+it just for the effect of being their mother--quite a different thing
+from the mild Marian of the past: Mr. Condrip's widow expansively
+obscured that image. She was little more than a ragged relic, a plain,
+prosaic result of him, as if she had somehow been pulled through him as
+through an obstinate funnel, only to be left crumpled and useless and
+with nothing in her but what he accounted for. She had grown red and
+almost fat, which were not happy signs of mourning; less and less like
+any Croy, particularly a Croy in trouble, and sensibly like her
+husband's two unmarried sisters, who came to see her, in Kate's view,
+much too often and stayed too long, with the consequence of inroads
+upon the tea and bread-and-butter--matters as to which Kate, not
+unconcerned with the tradesmen's books, had feelings. About them,
+moreover, Marian _was_ touchy, and her nearer relative, who observed
+and weighed things, noted as an oddity that she would have taken any
+reflection on them as a reflection on herself. If that was what
+marriage necessarily did to you, Kate Croy would have questioned
+marriage. It was a grave example, at any rate, of what a man--and such
+a man!--might make of a woman. She could see how the Condrip pair
+pressed their brother's widow on the subject of Aunt Maud--who wasn't,
+after all, _their_ aunt; made her, over their interminable cups,
+chatter and even swagger about Lancaster Gate, made her more vulgar
+than it had seemed written that any Croy could possibly become on such
+a subject. They laid it down, they rubbed it in, that Lancaster Gate
+was to be kept in sight, and that she, Kate, was to keep it; so that,
+curiously, or at all events sadly, our young woman was sure of being,
+in her own person, more permitted to them as an object of comment than
+they would in turn ever be permitted to herself. 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. "I
+don't quite see," she answered, "where, in particular, it strikes you
+that my danger lies. I'm not conscious, I assure you, of the least
+'disposition' to throw myself anywhere. I feel as if, for the present,
+I have been quite sufficiently thrown."
+
+"You don't feel"--Marian brought it all out--"as if you would like to
+marry Merton Densher?"
+
+Kate took a moment to meet this inquiry. "Is it your idea that if I
+should feel so I would be bound to give you notice, so that you might
+step in and head me off? Is that your idea?" the girl asked. Then, as
+her sister also had a pause, "I don't know what makes you talk of Mr.
+Densher," she observed.
+
+"I talk of him just because you don't. That you never do, in spite of
+what I know--that's what makes me think of him. Or rather perhaps it's
+what makes me think of _you._ If you don't know by this time what I
+hope for you, what I dream of--my attachment being what it is--it's no
+use my attempting to tell you." But Marian had in fact warmed to her
+work, and Kate was sure she had discussed Mr. Densher with the Miss
+Condrips. "If I name that person I suppose it's because I'm so afraid
+of him. If you want really to know, he fills me with terror. If you
+want really to know, in fact, I dislike him as much as I dread him."
+
+"And yet don't think it dangerous to abuse him to me?"
+
+"Yes," Mrs. Condrip confessed, "I do think it dangerous; but how can I
+speak of him otherwise? I dare say, I admit, that I shouldn't speak of
+him at all. Only I do want you for once, as I said just now, to know."
+
+"To know what, my dear?"
+
+"That I should regard it," Marian promptly returned, "as far and away
+the worst thing that has happened to us yet."
+
+"Do you mean because he hasn't money?"
+
+"Yes, for one thing. And because I don't believe in him."
+
+Kate was civil, but perfunctory. "What do you mean by not believing in
+him?"
+
+"Well, being sure he'll never get it. And you _must_ have it. You
+_shall_ have it."
+
+"To give it to you?"
+
+Marian met her with a readiness that was practically pert. "To _have_
+it, first. Not, at any rate, to go on not having it. Then we should
+see."
+
+"We should indeed!" said Kate Croy. It was talk of a kind she loathed,
+but if Marian chose to be vulgar what was one to do? It made her think
+of the Miss Condrips with renewed aversion. "I like the way you arrange
+things--I like what you take for granted. If it's so easy for us to
+marry men who want us to scatter gold, I wonder we any of us do
+anything else. I don't see so many of them about, nor what interest I
+might ever have for them. You live, my dear," she presently added, "in
+a world of vain thoughts."
+
+"Not so much as you, Kate; for I see what I see, and you can't turn it
+off that way." The elder sister paused long enough for the younger's
+face to show, in spite of superiority, an apprehension. "I'm not
+talking of any man but Aunt Maud's man, nor of any money, even, if you
+like, but Aunt Maud's money. I'm not talking of anything but your doing
+what _she_ wants. You're wrong if you speak of anything that I want of
+you; I want nothing but what she does. That's good enough for me!"--and
+Marian's tone struck her companion as dreadful. "If I don't believe in
+Merton Densher, I do at least in Mrs. Lowder."
+
+"Your ideas are the more striking," Kate returned, "that they're the
+same as papa's. I had them from him, you may be interested to know--and
+with all the brilliancy you may imagine--yesterday."
+
+Marian clearly was interested to know. "He has been to see you?"
+
+"No, I went to him."
+
+"Really?" Marian wondered. "For what purpose?"
+
+"To tell him I'm ready to go to him."
+
+Marian stared. "To leave Aunt Maud----?"
+
+"For my father, yes."
+
+She had fairly flushed, poor Mrs. Condrip, with horror. "You're
+ready----?"
+
+"So I told him. I couldn't tell him less."
+
+"And, pray, could you tell him more?" Marian gasped in her distress.
+"What in the world is he _to_ us? You bring out such a thing as that
+this way?"
+
+They faced each other--the tears were in Marian's eyes. Kate watched
+them there a moment and then said: "I had thought it well over--over
+and over. But you needn't feel injured. I'm not going. He won't have
+me."
+
+Her companion still panted--it took time to subside. "Well, _I_
+wouldn't have you--wouldn't receive you at all, I can assure you--if he
+had made you any other answer. I do feel injured--at your having been
+willing. If you were to go to papa, my dear, you would have to stop
+coming to me." Marian put it thus, indefinably, as a picture of
+privation from which her companion might shrink. Such were the threats
+she could complacently make, could think herself masterful for making.
+"But if he won't take you," she continued, "he shows at least his
+sharpness."
+
+Marian had always her views of sharpness; she was, as her sister
+privately commented, great on it. But Kate had her refuge from
+irritation. "He won't take me," she simply repeated. "But he believes,
+like you, in Aunt Maud. He threatens me with his curse if I leave her."
+
+"So you _won't?"_ As the girl at first said nothing her companion
+caught at it. "You won't, of course? I see you won't. But I don't see
+why, nevertheless, I shouldn't insist to you once for all on the plain
+truth of the whole matter. The truth, my dear, of your duty. Do you
+ever think about _that?_ It's the greatest duty of all."
+
+"There you are again," Kate laughed. "Papa's also immense on my duty."
+
+"Oh, I don't pretend to be immense, but I pretend to know more than you
+do of life; more even perhaps than papa." Marian seemed to see that
+personage at this moment, nevertheless, in the light of a kinder irony.
+"Poor old papa!"
+
+She sighed it with as many condonations as her sister's ear had more
+than once caught in her "Dear old Aunt Maud!" These were things that
+made Kate, for the time, turn sharply away, and she gathered herself
+now to go. They were the note again of the abject; it was hard to say
+which of the persons in question had most shown how little they liked
+her. The younger woman proposed, at any rate, to let discussion rest,
+and she believed that, for herself, she had done so during the ten
+minutes that, thanks to her wish not to break off short, elapsed before
+she could gracefully withdraw. It then appeared, however, that Marian
+had been discussing still, and there was something that, at the last,
+Kate had to take up. "Whom do you mean by Aunt Maud's young man?"
+
+"Whom should I mean but Lord Mark?"
+
+"And where do you pick up such vulgar twaddle?" Kate demanded with her
+clear face. "How does such stuff, in this hole, get to you?"
+
+She had no sooner spoken than she asked herself what had become of the
+grace to which she had sacrificed. Marian certainly did little to save
+it, and nothing indeed was so inconsequent as her ground of complaint.
+She desired her to "work" Lancaster Gate as she believed that scene of
+abundance could be worked; but she now didn't see why advantage should
+be taken of the bloated connection to put an affront on her own poor
+home. She appeared in fact for the moment to take the position that
+Kate kept her in her "hole" and then heartlessly reflected on her being
+in it. Yet she didn't explain how she had picked up the report on which
+her sister had challenged her--so that it was thus left to her sister
+to see in it, once more, a sign of the creeping curiosity of the Miss
+Condrips. They lived in a deeper hole than Marian, but they kept their
+ear to the ground, they spent their days in prowling, whereas Marian,
+in garments and shoes that seemed steadily to grow looser and larger,
+never prowled. There were times when Kate wondered if the Miss Condrips
+were offered her by fate as a warning for her own future--to be taken
+as showing her what she herself might become at forty if she let things
+too recklessly go. What was expected of her by others--and by so many
+of them--could, all the same, on occasion, present itself as beyond a
+joke; and this was just now the aspect it particularly wore. She was
+not only to quarrel with Merton Densher to oblige her five
+spectators--with the Miss Condrips there were five; she was to set
+forth in pursuit of Lord Mark on some preposterous theory of the
+premium attached to success. Mrs. Lowder's hand had attached it, and it
+figured at the end of the course as a bell that would ring, break out
+into public clamour, as soon as touched. Kate reflected sharply enough
+on the weak points of this fond fiction, with the result at last of a
+certain chill for her sister's confidence; though Mrs. Condrip still
+took refuge in the plea--which was after all the great point--that
+their aunt would be munificent when their aunt should be pleased. The
+exact identity of her candidate was a detail; what was of the essence
+was her conception of the kind of match it was open to her niece to
+make with her aid. Marian always spoke of marriages as "matches," but
+that was again a detail. Mrs. Lowder's "aid" meanwhile awaited them--if
+not to light the way to Lord Mark, then to somebody better. Marian
+would put up, in fine, with somebody better; she only wouldn't put up
+with somebody so much worse. Kate had, once more, to go through all
+this before a graceful issue was reached. It was reached by her paying
+with the sacrifice of Mr. Densher for her reduction of Lord Mark to the
+absurd. So they separated softly enough. She was to be let off hearing
+about Lord Mark so long as she made it good that she wasn't underhand
+about anybody else. She had denied everything and every one, she
+reflected as she went away--and that was a relief; but it also made
+rather a clean sweep of the future. The prospect put on a bareness that
+already gave her something in common with the Miss Condrips.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SECOND
+
+III
+
+Merton Densher, who passed the best hours of each night at the office
+of his newspaper, had at times, during the day, to make up for it, a
+sense, or at least an appearance, of leisure, in accordance with which
+he was not infrequently to be met, in different parts of the town, at
+moments when men of business are hidden from the public eye. More than
+once, during the present winter's end, he had deviated, toward three
+o'clock, or toward four, into Kensington Gardens, where he might for a
+while, on each occasion, have been observed to demean himself as a
+person with nothing to do. He made his way indeed, for the most part,
+with a certain directness, over to the north side; but once that ground
+was reached his behaviour was noticeably wanting in point. He moved
+seemingly at random from alley to alley; he stopped for no reason and
+remained idly agaze; he sat down in a chair and then changed to a
+bench; after which he walked about again, only again to repeat both the
+vagueness and the vivacity. Distinctly, he was a man either with
+nothing at all to do or with ever so much to think about; and it was
+not to be denied that the impression he might often thus easily make
+had the effect of causing the burden of proof, in certain directions,
+to rest on him. It was a little the fault of his aspect, his personal
+marks, which made it almost impossible to name his profession.
+
+He was a longish, leanish, fairish young Englishman, not unamenable, on
+certain sides, to classification--as for instance by being a gentleman,
+by being rather specifically one of the educated, one of the generally
+sound and generally pleasant; 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. On the other hand he was
+credulous for diplomacy, or perhaps even for science, while he was
+perhaps at the same time too much in his mere senses for poetry, and
+yet too little in them for art. 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; of
+his straight hair and his well-shaped head, never, the latter, neatly
+smooth, and apt, into the bargain, at the time of quite other calls
+upon it, to throw itself suddenly back and, supported behind by his
+uplifted arms and interlocked hands, place him for unconscionable
+periods in communion with the ceiling, the tree-tops, the sky. He was
+in short visibly absent-minded, irregularly clever, liable to drop what
+was near and to take up what was far; he was more a respecter, in
+general, than a follower of custom. He suggested above all, however,
+that wondrous state of youth in which the elements, the metals more or
+less precious, are so in fusion and fermentation that the question of
+the final stamp, the pressure that fixes the value, must wait for
+comparative coolness. And it was a mark of his interesting mixture that
+if he was irritable it was by a law of considerable subtlety--a law
+that, in intercourse with him, it might be of profit, though not easy,
+to master. One of the effects of it was that he had for you surprises
+of tolerance as well as of temper.
+
+He loitered, on the best of the relenting days, the several occasions
+we speak of, along the part of the Gardens nearest to Lancaster Gate,
+and when, always, in due time, Kate Croy came out of her aunt's house,
+crossed the road and arrived by the nearest entrance, there was a
+general publicity in the proceeding which made it slightly anomalous.
+If their meeting was to be bold and free it might have taken place
+within doors; if it was to be shy or secret it might have taken place
+almost anywhere better than under Mrs. Lowder's windows. They failed
+indeed to remain attached to that spot; they wandered and strolled,
+taking in the course of more than one of these interviews a
+considerable walk, or else picked out a couple of chairs under one of
+the great trees and sat as much apart--apart from every one else--as
+possible. But Kate had, each time, at first, the air of wishing to
+expose herself to pursuit and capture if those things were in question.
+She made the point that she was not underhand, any more than she was
+vulgar; that the Gardens were charming in themselves and this use of
+them a matter of taste; and that, if her aunt chose to glare at her
+from the drawing-room or to cause her to be tracked and overtaken, she
+could at least make it convenient that this should be easily done. The
+fact was that the relation between these young persons abounded in such
+oddities as were not inaptly symbolised by assignations that had a good
+deal more appearance than motive. Of the strength of the tie that held
+them we shall sufficiently take the measure; but it was meanwhile
+almost obvious that if the great possibility had come up for them it
+had done so, to an exceptional degree, under the protection of the
+famous law of contraries. Any deep harmony that might eventually govern
+them would not be the result of their having much in common--having
+anything, in fact, but their affection; and would really find its
+explanation in some sense, on the part of each, of being poor where the
+other was rich. It is nothing new indeed that generous young persons
+often admire most what nature hasn't given them--from which it would
+appear, after all, that our friends were both generous.
+
+Merton Densher had repeatedly said to himself--and from far back--that
+he should be a fool not to marry a woman whose value would be in her
+differences; and Kate Croy, though without having quite so
+philosophised, had quickly recognised in the young man a precious
+unlikeness. He represented what her life had never given her and
+certainly, without some such aid as his, never would give her; all the
+high, dim things she lumped together as of the mind. It was on the side
+of the mind that Densher was rich for her, and mysterious and strong;
+and he had rendered her in especial the sovereign service of making
+that element real. She had had, all her days, to take it terribly on
+trust; no creature she had ever encountered having been able in any
+degree to testify for it directly. Vague rumours of its existence had
+made their precarious way to her; but nothing had, on the whole, struck
+her as more likely than that she should live and die without the chance
+to verify them. The chance had come--it was an extraordinary one--on
+the day she first met Densher; and it was to the girl's lasting honour
+that she knew on the spot what she was in the presence of. That
+occasion indeed, for everything that straightway flowered in 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 recognition. 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 possess. 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, ingenious 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 beginning.
+
+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 delight of the town, an American reciter, the joy
+of a kindred people, an Hungarian fiddler, the wonder 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 convoked. She
+lived under her mother's roof, as she considered, obscurely, and was
+acquainted with few persons who entertained on that scale; but she had
+had dealings with two or three connected, as appeared, with such--two
+or three through whom the stream of hospitality, filtered or diffused,
+could thus now and then spread to outlying receptacles. A good-natured
+lady in fine, a friend of her mother and a relative of the lady of the
+gallery, had offered to take her to the party in question and had there
+fortified her, further, with two or three of those introductions that,
+at large parties, lead to other things--that had at any rate, on this
+occasion, culminated for her in conversation with a tall, fair,
+slightly unbrushed and rather awkward, but on the whole not dreary,
+young man. The young man had affected her as detached, as--it was
+indeed what he called himself--awfully at sea, as much more distinct
+from what surrounded them than any one else appeared to be, and even as
+probably quite disposed to be making his escape when pulled up to be
+placed in relation with her. He gave her his word for it indeed, that
+same evening, that only their meeting had prevented his flight, but
+that now he saw how sorry he should have been to miss it. This point
+they had reached by midnight, and though in respect to such remarks
+everything was in the tone, the tone was by midnight there too. 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. It wasn't, in a word, simply that their eyes
+had met; other conscious organs, faculties, feelers had met as well,
+and when Kate afterwards imaged to herself the sharp, deep fact she saw
+it, in the oddest way, as a particular performance. She had observed a
+ladder against a garden wall, and had trusted herself so to climb it as
+to be able to see over into the probable garden on the other side. On
+reaching the top she had found herself face to face with a gentleman
+engaged in a like calculation at the same moment, and the two inquirers
+had remained confronted on their ladders. The great point was that for
+the rest of that evening they had been perched--they had not climbed
+down; and indeed, during the time that followed, Kate at least had had
+the perched feeling--it was as if she were there aloft without a
+retreat. A simpler expression of all this is doubtless but that they
+had taken each other in with interest; and without a happy hazard six
+months later the incident would have closed in that account of it. The
+accident, meanwhile, had been as natural as anything in London ever is:
+Kate had one afternoon found herself opposite Mr. Densher on the
+Underground Railway. She had entered the train at Sloane Square to go
+to Queen's Road, and the carriage in which she had found a place was
+all but full. Densher was already in it--on the other bench and at the
+furthest angle; she was sure of him before they had again started. The
+day and the hour were darkness, there were six other persons, and she
+had been busy placing herself; but her consciousness had gone to him as
+straight as if they had come together in some bright level of the
+desert. They had on neither part a second's hesitation; they looked
+across the choked compartment exactly as if she had known he would be
+there and he had expected her to come in; so that, though in the
+conditions they could only exchange the greeting of movements, smiles,
+silence, it would have been quite in the key of these passages that
+they should have alighted for ease at the very next station. Kate was
+in fact sure that the very next station was the young man's true
+goal--which made it clear that he was going on only from the wish to
+speak to her. He had to go on, for this purpose, to High Street,
+Kensington, as it was not till then that the exit of a passenger gave
+him his chance.
+
+His chance put him, however, in quick possession of the seat facing
+her, the alertness of his capture of which seemed to show her his
+impatience. It helped them, moreover, with strangers on either side,
+little to talk; though this very restriction perhaps made such a mark
+for them as nothing else could have done. If the fact that their
+opportunity had again come round for them could be so intensely
+expressed between them without a word, they might very well feel on the
+spot that it had not come round for nothing. The extraordinary part of
+the matter was that they were not in the least meeting where they had
+left off, but ever so much further on, and that these added links added
+still another between High Street and Notting Hill Gate, and then
+between the latter station and Queen's Road an extension really
+inordinate. At Notting Hill Gate, Kate's right-hand neighbour
+descended, whereupon Densher popped straight into that seat; only there
+was not much gained when a lady, the next instant, popped into
+Densher's. He could say almost nothing to her--she scarce knew, at
+least, what he said; she was so occupied with a certainty that one of
+the persons opposite, a youngish man with a single eyeglass, which he
+kept constantly in position, had made her out from the first as
+visibly, as strangely affected. If such a person made her out, what
+then did Densher do?--a question in truth sufficiently answered when,
+on their reaching her station, he instantly followed her out of the
+train. That had been the real beginning--the beginning of everything
+else; the other time, the time at the party, had been but the beginning
+of _that._ Never in life before had she so let herself go; for always
+before--so far as small adventures could have been in question for
+her--there had been, by the vulgar measure, more to go upon. He had
+walked with her to Lancaster Gate, and then she had walked with him
+away from it--for all the world, she said to herself, like the
+housemaid giggling to the baker.
+
+This appearance, she was afterwards to feel, had been all in order for
+a relation that might precisely best be described in the terms of the
+baker and the housemaid. She could say to herself that from that hour
+they had kept company; that had come to represent, technically
+speaking, alike the range and the limit of their tie. He had on the
+spot, naturally, asked leave to call upon her--which, as a young person
+who wasn't really young, who didn't pretend to be a sheltered flower,
+she as rationally gave. That--she was promptly clear about it--was now
+her only possible basis; she was just the contemporary London female,
+highly modern, inevitably battered, honourably free. She had of course
+taken her aunt straight into her confidence--had gone through the form
+of asking her leave; and she subsequently remembered that though, on
+this occasion, she had left the history of her new alliance as scant as
+the facts themselves, Mrs. Lowder had struck her at the time
+surprisingly mild. It had been, in every way, the occasion, full of the
+reminder that her hostess was deep: it was definitely then that she had
+begun to ask herself what Aunt Maud was, in vulgar parlance, "up to."
+"You may receive, my dear, whom you like"--that was what Aunt Maud, who
+in general objected to people's doing as they liked, had replied; and
+it bore, this unexpectedness, a good deal of looking into. There were
+many explanations, and they were all amusing--amusing, that is, in the
+line of the sombre and brooding amusement, cultivated by Kate in her
+actual high retreat. Merton Densher came the very next Sunday; but Mrs.
+Lowder was so consistently magnanimous as to make it possible to her
+niece to see him alone. She saw him, however, on the Sunday following,
+in order to invite him to dinner; and when, after dining, he came
+again--which he did three times, she found means to treat his visit as
+preponderantly to herself. Kate's conviction that she didn't like him
+made that remarkable; it added to the evidence, by this time
+voluminous, that she was remarkable all round. If she had been, in the
+way of energy, merely usual, she would have kept her dislike direct;
+whereas it was now as if she were seeking to know him in order to see
+best where to "have" him. That was one of the reflections made in our
+young woman's high retreat; she smiled from her lookout, in the silence
+that was only the fact of hearing irrelevant sounds, as she caught the
+truth that you could easily accept people when you wanted them so to be
+delivered to you. When Aunt Maud wished them despatched, it was not to
+be done by deputy; it was clearly always a matter reserved for her own
+hand. But what made the girl wonder most was the implications of so
+much diplomacy in respect to her own value. What view might she take of
+her position in the light of this appearance that her companion feared
+so, as yet, to upset her? It was as if Densher were accepted partly
+under the dread that if he hadn't been she would act in resentment.
+Hadn't her aunt considered the danger that she would in that case have
+broken off, have seceded? The danger was exaggerated--she would have
+done nothing so gross; but that, it seemed, was the way Mrs. Lowder saw
+her and believed her to be reckoned with. What importance therefore did
+she really attach to her, what strange interest could she take on their
+keeping on terms? Her father and her sister had their answer to
+this--even without knowing how the question struck her; they saw the
+lady of Lancaster Gate as panting to make her fortune, and the
+explanation of that appetite was that, on the accident of a nearer view
+than she had before enjoyed, she had been charmed, been dazzled. They
+approved, they admired in her one of the belated fancies of rich,
+capricious, violent old women--the more marked, moreover, because the
+result of no plot; and they piled up the possible results for the
+person concerned. Kate knew what to think of her own power thus to
+carry by storm; she saw herself as handsome, no doubt, but as hard, and
+felt herself as clever but as cold; and as so much too imperfectly
+ambitious, furthermore, that it was a pity, for a quiet life, she
+couldn't settle to be either finely or stupidly indifferent. Her
+intelligence sometimes kept her still--too still--but her want of it
+was restless; so that she got the good, it seemed to her, of neither
+extreme. She saw herself at present, none the less, in a situation, and
+even her sad, disillusioned mother, dying, but with Aunt Maud
+interviewing the nurse on the stairs, had not failed to remind her that
+it was of the essence of situations to be, under Providence, worked.
+The dear woman had died in the belief that she was actually working the
+one then produced.
+
+Kate took one of her walks with Densher just after her visit to Mr.
+Croy; but most of it went, as usual, to their sitting in talk. They
+had, under the trees, by the lake, the air of old friends--phases of
+apparent earnestness, in particular, in which they might have been
+settling every question in their vast young world; and periods of
+silence, side by side, perhaps even more, when "a long engagement!"
+would have been the final reading of the signs on the part of a passer
+struck with them, as it was so easy to be. They would have presented
+themselves thus as very old friends rather than as young persons who
+had met for the first time but a year before and had spent most of the
+interval without contact. It was indeed for each, already, as if they
+were older friends; and though the succession of their meetings might,
+between them, have been straightened out, they only had a confused
+sense of a good many, very much alike, and a confused intention of a
+good many more, as little different as possible. The desire to keep
+them just as they were had perhaps to do with the fact that in spite of
+the presumed diagnosis of the stranger there had been for them as yet
+no formal, no final understanding. Densher had at the very first
+pressed the question, but that, it had been easy to reply, was too
+soon; 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, in
+London, remarkable, and for Marian not less--as Aunt Maud touched
+neither directly--the mystery had worked. No doubt she had been seen.
+Of course she had been seen. She had taken no trouble not to be seen,
+and it was a thing, clearly, she was incapable of taking. But she had
+been seen how?--and _what_ was there to see? She was in love--she knew
+that: but it was wholly her own business, and she had the sense of
+having conducted herself, of still so doing, with almost violent
+conformity.
+
+"I've an idea--in fact I feel sure--that Aunt Maud means to write to
+you; and I think you had better know it." So much as this she said to
+him as soon as they met, but immediately adding to it: "So as to make
+up your mind how to take her. I know pretty well what she'll say to
+you."
+
+"Then will you kindly tell me?"
+
+She thought a little. "I can't do that. I should spoil it. She'll do
+the best for her own idea."
+
+"Her idea, you mean, that I'm a sort of a scoundrel; or, at the best,
+not good enough for you?"
+
+They were side by side again in their penny chairs, and Kate had
+another pause. "Not good enough for _her."_
+
+"Oh, I see. And that's necessary."
+
+He put it as a truth rather more than as a question; but there had been
+plenty of truths between them that each had contradicted. Kate,
+however, let this one sufficiently pass, only saying the next moment:
+"She has behaved extraordinarily."
+
+"And so have we," Densher declared. "I think, you know, we've been
+awfully decent."
+
+"For ourselves, for each other, for people in general, yes. But not for
+_her._ For her," said Kate, "we've been monstrous. She has been giving
+us rope. So if she does send for you," the girl repeated, "you must
+know where you are."
+
+"That I always know. It's where _you_ are that concerns me."
+
+"Well," said Kate after an instant, "her idea of that is what you'll
+have from her." He gave her a long look, and whatever else people who
+wouldn't let her alone might have wished, for her advancement, his long
+looks were the thing in the world she could never have enough of. What
+she felt was that, whatever might happen, she must keep them, must make
+them most completely her possession; and it was already strange enough
+that she reasoned, or at all events began to act, as if she might work
+them in with other and alien things, privately cherish them, and yet,
+as regards the rigour of it, pay no price. She looked it well in the
+face, she took it intensely home, that they were lovers; she rejoiced
+to herself and, frankly, to him, in their wearing of the name; but,
+distinguished creature that, in her way, she was, she took a view of
+this character that scarce squared with the conventional. The character
+itself she insisted on as their right, taking that so for granted that
+it didn't seem even bold; but Densher, though he agreed with her, found
+himself moved to wonder at her simplifications, her values. Life might
+prove difficult--was evidently going to; but meanwhile they had each
+other, and that was everything. This was her reasoning, but meanwhile,
+for _him,_ each other was what they didn't have, and it was just the
+point. Repeatedly, however, it was a point that, in the face of strange
+and special things, he judged it rather awkwardly gross to urge. It was
+impossible to keep Mrs. Lowder out of their scheme. She stood there too
+close to it and too solidly; it had to open a gate, at a given point,
+do what they would to take her in. And she came in, always, while they
+sat together rather helplessly watching her, as in a coach-in-four; she
+drove round their prospect as the principal lady at the circus drives
+round the ring, and she stopped the coach in the middle to alight with
+majesty. It was our young man's sense that she was magnificently
+vulgar, but yet, quite, that this wasn't all. It wasn't with her
+vulgarity that she felt his want of means, though that might have
+helped her richly to embroider it; nor was it with the same infirmity
+that she was strong, original, dangerous.
+
+His want of means--of means sufficient for anyone but himself--was
+really the great ugliness, and was, moreover, at no time more ugly for
+him than when it rose there, as it did seem to rise, shameless, face to
+face with the elements in Kate's life colloquially and conveniently
+classed by both of them as funny. He sometimes indeed, for that matter,
+asked himself if these elements were as funny as the innermost fact, so
+often vivid to him, of his own consciousness--his private inability to
+believe he should ever be rich. His conviction on this head was in
+truth quite positive and a thing by itself; he failed, after analysis,
+to understand it, though he had naturally more lights on it than any
+one else. He knew how it subsisted in spite of an equal consciousness
+of his being neither mentally nor physically quite helpless, neither a
+dunce nor a cripple; he knew it to be absolute, though secret, and
+also, strange to say, about common undertakings, not discouraging, not
+prohibitive. Only now was he having to think if it were prohibitive in
+respect to marriage; only now, for the first time, had he to weigh his
+case in scales. The scales, as he sat with Kate, often dangled in the
+line of his vision; he saw them, large and black, while he talked or
+listened, take, in the bright air, singular positions. Sometimes the
+right was down and sometimes the left; never a happy equipoise--one or
+the other always kicking the beam. Thus was kept before him the
+question of whether it were more ignoble to ask a woman to take her
+chance with you, or to accept it from one's conscience that her chance
+could be at the best but one of the degrees of privation; whether, too,
+otherwise, marrying for money mightn't after all be a smaller cause of
+shame than the mere dread of marrying without. Through these variations
+of mood and view, all the same, the mark on his forehead stood clear;
+he saw himself remain without whether he married or not. It was a line
+on which his fancy could be admirably active; the innumerable ways of
+making money were beautifully present to him; he could have handled
+them, for his newspaper, as easily as he handled everything. He was
+quite aware how he handled everything; it was another mark on his
+forehead; the pair of smudges from the thumb of fortune, the brand on
+the passive fleece, dated from the primal hour and kept each other
+company. He wrote, as for print, with deplorable ease; since there had
+been nothing to stop him even at the age of ten, so there was as little
+at twenty; it was part of his fate in the first place and part of the
+wretched public's in the second. The innumerable ways of making money
+were, no doubt, at all events, what his imagination often was busy with
+after he had tilted his chair and thrown back his head with his hands
+clasped behind it. What would most have prolonged that attitude,
+moreover, was the reflection that the ways were ways only for others.
+Within the minute, now--however this might be--he was aware of a nearer
+view than he had yet quite had of those circumstances on his
+companion's part that made least for simplicity of relation. He saw
+above all how she saw them herself, for she spoke of them at present
+with the last frankness, telling him of her visit to her father and
+giving him, in an account of her subsequent scene with her sister, an
+instance of how she was perpetually reduced to patching up, in one way
+or another, that unfortunate woman's hopes.
+
+"The tune," she exclaimed, "to which we're a failure as a family!" With
+which he had it again all from her--and this time, as it seemed to him,
+more than all: the dishonour her father had brought them, his folly and
+cruelty and wickedness; the wounded state of her mother, abandoned,
+despoiled and helpless, yet, for the management of such a home as
+remained to them, dreadfully unreasonable too; the extinction of her
+two young brothers--one, at nineteen, the eldest of the house, by
+typhoid fever, contracted at a poisonous little place, as they had
+afterwards found out, that they had taken for a summer; the other, the
+flower of the flock, a middy on the _Britannia,_ dreadfully drowned,
+and not even by an accident at sea, but by cramp, unrescued, while
+bathing, too late in the autumn, in a wretched little river during a
+holiday visit to the home of a shipmate. Then Marian's unnatural
+marriage, in itself a kind of spiritless turning of the other cheek to
+fortune: her actual wretchedness and plaintiveness, her greasy
+children, her impossible claims, her odious visitors--these things
+completed the proof of the heaviness, for them all, of the hand of
+fate. Kate confessedly described them with an excess of impatience; it
+was much of her charm for Densher that she gave in general that turn to
+her descriptions, partly as if to amuse him by free and humorous
+colour, partly--and that charm was the greatest--as if to work off, for
+her own relief, her constant perception of the incongruity of things.
+She had seen the general show too early and too sharply, and she was so
+intelligent that she knew it and allowed for that misfortune; therefore
+when, in talk with him, she was violent and almost unfeminine, it was
+almost as if they had settled, for intercourse, on the short cut of the
+fantastic and the happy language of exaggeration. It had come to be
+definite between them at a primary stage that, if they could have no
+other straight way, the realm of thought at least was open to them.
+They could think whatever they liked about whatever they would--or, in
+other words, they could say it. Saying it for each other, for each
+other alone, only of course added to the taste. The implication was
+thereby constant that what they said when not together had no taste for
+them at all, and nothing could have served more to launch them, at
+special hours, on their small floating island than such an assumption
+that they were only making believe everywhere else. Our young man, it
+must be added, was conscious enough that it was Kate who profited most
+by this particular play of the fact of intimacy. It always seemed to
+him that she had more life than he to react from, and when she
+recounted the dark disasters of her house and glanced at the hard, odd
+offset of her present exaltation--since as exaltation it was apparently
+to be considered--he felt his own grey domestic annals to make little
+show. It was naturally, in all such reference, the question of her
+father's character that engaged him most, but her picture of her
+adventure in Chirk Street gave him a sense of how little as yet that
+character was clear to him. What was it, to speak plainly, that Mr.
+Croy had originally done?
+
+"I don't know--and I don't want to. I only know that years and years
+ago--when I was about fifteen--something or other happened that made
+him impossible. I mean impossible for the world at large first, and
+then, little by little, for mother. We of course didn't know it at the
+time," Kate explained, "but we knew it later; and it was, oddly enough,
+my sister who first made out that he had done something. I can hear her
+now--the way, one cold, black Sunday morning when, on account of an
+extraordinary fog, we had not gone to church, she broke it to me by the
+school-room fire. I was reading a history-book by the lamp--when we
+didn't go to church we had to read history-books--and I suddenly heard
+her say, out of the fog, which was in the room, and _apropos_ of
+nothing: 'Papa has done something wicked.' And the curious thing was
+that I believed it on the spot and have believed it ever since, though
+she could tell me nothing more--neither what was the wickedness, nor
+how she knew, nor what would happen to him, nor anything else about it.
+We had our sense, always, that all sorts of things _had_ happened, were
+all the while happening, to him; so that when Marian only said she was
+sure, tremendously sure, that she had made it out for herself, but that
+that was enough, I took her word for it--it seemed somehow so natural.
+We were not, however, to ask mother--which made it more natural still,
+and I said never a word. But mother, strangely enough, spoke of it to
+me, in time, of her own accord very much later on. He hadn't been with
+us for ever so long, but we were used to that. She must have had some
+fear, some conviction that I had an idea, some idea of her own that it
+was the best thing to do. She came out as abruptly as Marian had done:
+'If you hear anything against your father--anything I mean, except that
+he's odious and vile--remember it's perfectly false.' That was the way
+I knew--it was true, though I recall that I said to her then that I of
+course knew it wasn't. She might have told me it was true, and yet have
+trusted me to contradict fiercely enough any accusation of him that I
+should meet--to contradict it much more fiercely and effectively, I
+think, than she would have done herself. As it happens, however," the
+girl went on, "I've never had occasion, and I've been conscious of it
+with a sort of surprise. It has made the world, at times, seem more
+decent. No one has so much as breathed to me. That has been a part of
+the silence, the silence that surrounds him, the silence that, for the
+world, has washed him out. He doesn't exist for people. And yet I'm as
+sure as ever. In fact, though I know no more than I did then, I'm more
+sure. And that," she wound up, "is what I sit here and tell you about
+my own father. If you don't call it a proof of confidence I don't know
+what will satisfy you."
+
+"It satisfies me beautifully," Densher declared, "but it doesn't, my
+dear child, very greatly enlighten me. You don't, you know, really tell
+me anything. It's so vague that what am I to think but that you may
+very well be mistaken? What has he done, if no one can name it?"
+
+"He has done everything."
+
+"Oh--everything! Everything's nothing."
+
+"Well then," said Kate, "he has done some particular thing. It's
+known--only, thank God, not to us. But it has been the end of him. You
+could doubtless find out with a little trouble. You can ask about."
+
+Densher for a moment said nothing; but the next moment he made it up.
+"I wouldn't find out for the world, and I'd rather lose my tongue than
+put a question."
+
+"And yet it's a part of me," said Kate.
+
+"A part of you?"
+
+"My father's dishonour." Then she sounded for him, but more deeply than
+ever yet, her note of proud, still pessimism. "How can such a thing as
+that not be the great thing in one's life?"
+
+She had to take from him again, on this, one of his long looks, and she
+took it to its deepest, its headiest dregs. "I shall ask you, for the
+great thing in your life," he said, "to depend on _me_ a little more."
+After which, just hesitating, "Doesn't he belong to some club?" he
+inquired.
+
+She had a grave headshake. "He used to--to many."
+
+"But he has dropped them?"
+
+"They've dropped _him._ Of that I'm sure. It ought to do for you. I
+offered him," the girl immediately continued--"and it was for that I
+went to him--to come and be with him, make a home for him so far as is
+possible. But he won't hear of it."
+
+Densher took this in with visible, but generous, wonder. "You offered
+him--'impossible' as you describe him to me--to live with him and share
+his disadvantages?" The young man saw for the moment but the high
+beauty of it. "You _are_ gallant!"
+
+"Because it strikes you as being brave for him?" She wouldn't in the
+least have this. "It wasn't courage--it was the opposite. I did it to
+save myself--to escape."
+
+He had his air, so constant at this stage, as of her giving him finer
+things than any one to think about. "Escape from what?"
+
+"From everything."
+
+"Do you by any chance mean from me?"
+
+"No; I spoke to him of you, told him--or what amounted to it--that I
+would bring you, if he would allow it, with me."
+
+"But he won't allow it," said Densher.
+
+"Won't hear of it on any terms. He won't help me, won't save me, won't
+hold out a finger to me," Kate went on; "he simply wriggles away, in
+his inimitable manner, and throws me back."
+
+"Back then, after all, thank goodness," Densher concurred, "on me."
+
+But she spoke again as with the sole vision of the whole scene she had
+evoked. "It's a pity, because you'd like him. He's wonderful--he's
+charming." Her companion gave one of the laughs that marked in him,
+again, his feeling in her tone, inveterately, something that banished
+the talk of other women, so far as he knew other women, to the dull
+desert of the conventional, and she had already continued. "He would
+make himself delightful to you."
+
+"Even while objecting to me?"
+
+"Well, he likes to please," the girl explained--"personally. He would
+appreciate you and be clever with you. It's to _me_ he objects--that is
+as to my liking you."
+
+"Heaven be praised then," Densher exclaimed, "that you like me enough
+for the objection!"
+
+But she met it after an instant with some inconsequence. "I don't. I
+offered to give you up, if necessary, to go to him. But it made no
+difference, and that's what I mean," she pursued, "by his declining me
+on any terms. The point is, you see, that I don't escape."
+
+Densher wondered. "But if you didn't wish to escape _me?"_
+
+"I wished to escape Aunt Maud. But he insists that it's through her and
+through her only that I may help him; just as Marian insists that it's
+through her, and through her only, that I can help _her._ That's what I
+mean," she again explained, "by their turning me back."
+
+The young man thought. "Your sister turns you back too?"
+
+"Oh, with a push!"
+
+"But have you offered to live with your sister?"
+
+"I would in a moment if she'd have me. That's all my virtue--a narrow
+little family feeling. I've a small stupid piety--I don't know what to
+call it." Kate bravely sustained it; she made it out. "Sometimes,
+alone, I've to smother my shrieks when I think of my poor mother. She
+went through things--they pulled her down; I know what they were now--I
+didn't then, for I was a pig; and my position, compared with hers, is
+an insolence of success. That's what Marian keeps before me; that's
+what papa himself, as I say, so inimitably does. My position's a value,
+a great value, for them both"--she followed and followed. Lucid and
+ironic, she knew no merciful muddle. "It's _the_ value--the only one
+they have."
+
+Everything between our young couple moved today, in spite of their
+pauses, their margin, to a quicker measure--the quickness and anxiety
+playing lightning-like in the sultriness. Densher watched, decidedly,
+as he had never done before. "And the fact you speak of holds you!"
+
+"Of course, it holds me. It's a perpetual sound in my ears. It makes me
+ask myself if I've any right to personal happiness, any right to
+anything but to be as rich and overflowing, as smart and shining, as I
+can be made."
+
+Densher had a pause. "Oh, you might, with good luck, have the personal
+happiness too."
+
+Her immediate answer to this was a silence like his own; after which
+she gave him straight in the face, but quite simply and quietly:
+"Darling!"
+
+It took him another moment; then he was also quiet and simple. "Will
+you settle it by our being married to-morrow--as we can, with perfect
+ease, civilly?"
+
+"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?"
+
+As soon as he had permitted himself this qualification of the
+unfortunate persons she so perversely cherished, he repented of his
+roughness--and partly because he expected a flash from her. But it was
+one of her finest sides that she sometimes flashed with a mere mild
+glow. "I don't see why you don't make out a little more that if we
+avoid stupidity we may do _all._ We may keep her."
+
+He stared. "Make her pension us?"
+
+"Well, wait at least till we have seen."
+
+He thought. "Seen what can be got out of her?"
+
+Kate for a moment said nothing. "After all I never asked her; never,
+when our troubles were at the worst, appealed to her nor went near her.
+She fixed upon me herself, settled on me with her wonderful gilded
+claws."
+
+"You speak," Densher observed, "as if she were a vulture."
+
+"Call it an eagle--with a gilded beak as well, and with wings for great
+flights. If she's a thing of the air, in short--say at once a
+balloon--I never myself got into her car. I was her choice."
+
+It had really, her sketch of the affair, a high colour and a great
+style; at all of which he gazed a minute as at a picture by a master.
+"What she must see in you!"
+
+"Wonders!" And, speaking it loud, she stood straight up. "Everything.
+There it is."
+
+Yes, there it was, and as she remained before him he continued to face
+it. "So that what you mean is that I'm to do my part in somehow
+squaring her?"
+
+"See her, see her," Kate said with impatience.
+
+"And grovel to her?"
+
+"Ah, do what you like!" And she walked in her impatience away.
+
+
+IV
+
+His eyes had followed her at this time quite long enough, before he
+overtook her, to make out more than ever, in the poise of her head, the
+pride of her step--he didn't know what best to call it--a part, at
+least, of Mrs. Lowder's reasons. He consciously winced while he figured
+his presenting himself as a reason opposed to these; though, at the
+same moment, with the source of Aunt Maud's inspiration thus before
+him, he was prepared to conform, by almost any abject attitude or
+profitable compromise, to his companion's easy injunction. He would do
+as _she_ liked--his own liking might come off as it would. He would
+help her to the utmost of his power; for, all the rest of that day and
+the next, her easy injunction, tossed off that way as she turned her
+beautiful back, was like the crack of a great whip in the blue air, the
+high element in which Mrs. Lowder hung. He wouldn't grovel perhaps--he
+wasn't quite ready for that; but he would be patient, ridiculous,
+reasonable, unreasonable, and above all deeply diplomatic. He would be
+clever, with all his cleverness--which he now shook hard, as he
+sometimes shook his poor, dear, shabby, old watch, to start it up
+again. It wasn't, thank goodness, as if there weren't plenty of that,
+and with what they could muster between them it would be little to the
+credit of their star, however pale, that defeat and
+surrender--surrender so early, so immediate--should have to ensue. It
+was not indeed that he thought of that disaster as, at the worst, a
+direct sacrifice of their possibilities: he imaged--it which was enough
+as some proved vanity, some exposed fatuity, in the idea of bringing
+Mrs. Lowder round. When, shortly afterwards, in this lady's vast
+drawing-room--the apartments at Lancaster Gate had struck him from the
+first as of prodigious extent--he awaited her, at her request, conveyed
+in a "reply-paid" telegram, his theory was that of their still clinging
+to their idea, though with a sense of the difficulty of it really
+enlarged to the scale of the place.
+
+He had the place for a long time--it seemed to him a quarter of an
+hour--to himself; and while Aunt Maud kept him and kept him, while
+observation and reflection crowded on him, he asked himself what was to
+be expected of a person who could treat one like that. The visit, the
+hour were of her own proposing, so that her delay, no doubt, was but
+part of a general plan of putting him to inconvenience. As he walked to
+and fro, however, taking in the message of her massive, florid
+furniture, the immense expression of her signs and symbols, he had as
+little doubt of the inconvenience he was prepared to suffer. He found
+himself even facing the thought that he had nothing to fall back on,
+and that that was as great a humiliation in a good cause as a proud man
+could desire. It had not yet been so distinct to him that he made no
+show--literally not the smallest; so complete a show seemed made there
+all about him; so almost abnormally affirmative, so aggressively erect,
+were the huge, heavy objects that syllabled his hostess story. "When
+all's said and done, you know, she's colossally vulgar"--he had once
+all but said that of Mrs. Lowder to her niece; only just keeping it
+back at the last, keeping it to himself with all its danger about it.
+It mattered because it bore so directly, and he at all events quite
+felt it a thing that Kate herself would some day bring out to him. It
+bore directly at present, and really all the more that somehow,
+strangely, it didn't in the least imply that Aunt Maud was dull or
+stale. She was vulgar with freshness, almost with beauty, since there
+was beauty, to a degree, in the play of so big and bold a temperament.
+She was in fine quite the largest possible quantity to deal with; and
+he was in the cage of the lioness without his whip--the whip, in a
+word, of a supply of proper retorts. He had no retort but that he loved
+the girl--which in such a house as that was painfully cheap. Kate had
+mentioned to him more than once that her aunt was Passionate, speaking
+of it as a kind of offset and uttering it as with a capital P, marking
+it as something that he might, that he in fact ought to, turn about in
+some way to their advantage. He wondered at this hour to what advantage
+he could turn it; but the case grew less simple the longer he waited.
+Decidedly there was something he hadn't enough of. He stood as one fast.
+
+His slow march to and fro seemed to give him the very measure; as he
+paced and paced the distance it became the desert of his poverty; at
+the sight of which expanse moreover he could pretend to himself as
+little as before that the desert looked redeemable. Lancaster Gate
+looked rich--that was all the effect; which it was unthinkable that any
+state of his own should ever remotely resemble. He read more vividly,
+more critically, as has been hinted, the appearances about him; and
+they did nothing so much as make him wonder at his aesthetic reaction.
+He hadn't known--and in spite of Kate's repeated reference to her own
+rebellions of taste--that he should "mind" so much how an independent
+lady might decorate her house. It was the language of the house itself
+that spoke to him, writing out for him, with surpassing breadth and
+freedom, the associations and conceptions, the ideals and possibilities
+of the mistress. Never, he flattered himself, had he seen anything so
+gregariously ugly--operatively, ominously so cruel. He was glad to have
+found this last name for the whole character; "cruel" somehow played
+into the subject for an article--that his impression put straight into
+his mind. He would write about the heavy horrors that could still
+flourish, that lifted their undiminished heads, in an age so proud of
+its short way with false gods; and it would be funny if what he should
+have got from Mrs. Lowder were to prove, after all, but a small amount
+of copy. Yet the great thing, really the dark thing, was that, even
+while he thought of the quick column he might add up, he felt it less
+easy to laugh at the heavy horrors than to quail before them. He
+couldn't describe and dismiss them collectively, call them either
+Mid-Victorian or Early; not being at all sure they were rangeable under
+one rubric. It was only manifest they were splendid and were
+furthermore conclusively British. They constituted an order and they
+abounded in rare material--precious woods, metals, stuffs, stones. He
+had never dreamed of anything so fringed and scalloped, so buttoned and
+corded, drawn everywhere so tight, and curled everywhere so thick. He
+had never dreamed of so much gilt and glass, so much satin and plush,
+so much rosewood and marble and malachite. But it was, above all, the
+solid forms, the wasted finish, the misguided cost, the general
+attestation of morality and money, a good conscience and a big balance.
+These things finally represented for him a portentous negation of his
+own world of thought--of which, for that matter, in the presence of
+them, he became as for the first time hopelessly aware. They revealed
+it to him by their merciless difference. His interview with Aunt Maud,
+none the less, took by no means the turn he had expected. Passionate
+though her nature, no doubt Mrs. Lowder, on this occasion, neither
+threatened nor appealed. Her arms of aggression, her weapons of
+defence, were presumably close at hand, but she left them untouched and
+unmentioned, and was in fact so bland that he properly perceived only
+afterwards how adroit she had been. He properly perceived something
+else as well, which complicated his case; he shouldn't have known what
+to call it if he hadn't called it her really imprudent good-nature. Her
+blandness, in other words, was not mere policy--he wasn't dangerous
+enough for policy; it was the result, he could see, of her fairly
+liking him a little. From the moment she did that she herself became
+more interesting; and who knew what might happen should he take to
+liking _her?_ Well, it was a risk he naturally must face. She fought
+him, at any rate, but with one hand, with a few loose grains of stray
+powder. He recognised at the end of ten minutes, and even without her
+explaining it, that if she had made him wait it had not been to wound
+him; they had by that time almost directly met on the fact of her
+intention. She had wanted him to think for himself of what she proposed
+to say to him--not having otherwise announced it; wanted to let it come
+home to him on the spot, as she had shrewdly believed it would. Her
+first question, on appearing, had practically been as to whether he
+hadn't taken her hint, and this inquiry assumed so many things that it
+made discussion, immediately, frank and large. He knew, with the
+question put, that the hint was just what he _had_ taken; knew that she
+had made him quickly forgive her the display of her power; knew that if
+he didn't take care he should understand her, and the strength of her
+purpose, to say nothing of that of her imagination, nothing of the
+length of her purse, only too well. Yet he pulled himself up with the
+thought, too, that he was not going to be afraid of understanding her;
+he was just going to understand and understand without detriment to the
+feeblest, even, of his passions. The play of one's mind let one in, at
+the best, dreadfully, in action, in the need of action, where
+simplicity was all; but when one couldn't prevent it the thing was to
+make it complete. There would never be mistakes but for the original
+fun of mistakes. What he must use his fatal intelligence for was to
+resist. Mrs. Lowder, meanwhile, might use it for whatever she liked.
+
+It was after she had begun her statement of her own idea about Kate
+that he began, on his side, to reflect that--with her manner of
+offering it as really sufficient if he would take the trouble to
+embrace--it she couldn't half hate him. That was all, positively, she
+seemed to show herself for the time as attempting; clearly, if she did
+her intention justice, she would have nothing more disagreeable to do.
+"If I hadn't been ready to go very much further, you understand, I
+wouldn't have gone so far. I don't care what you repeat to her--the
+more you repeat to her, perhaps the better; and, at any rate, there's
+nothing she doesn't already know. I don't say it for her; I say it for
+you--when I want to reach my niece I know how to do it straight." So
+Aunt Maud delivered herself--as with homely benevolence, in the
+simplest, but the clearest terms; virtually conveying that, though a
+word to the wise was, doubtless, in spite of the advantage, _not_
+always enough, a word to the good could never fail to be. The sense our
+young man read into her words was that she liked him because he was
+good--was really, by her measure, good enough: good enough, that is, to
+give up her niece for her and go his way in peace. But _was_ he good
+enough--by his own measure? He fairly wondered, while she more fully
+expressed herself, if it might be his doom to prove so. "She's the
+finest possible creature--of course you flatter yourself that you know
+it. But I know it, quite as well as you possibly can--by which I mean a
+good deal better yet; and the tune to which I'm ready to prove my faith
+compares favourably enough, I think, with anything _you_ can do. I
+don't say it because she's my niece--that's nothing to me: I might have
+had fifty nieces, and I wouldn't have brought one of them to this place
+if I hadn't found her to my taste. I don't say I wouldn't have done
+something else, but I wouldn't have put up with her presence. Kate's
+presence, by good fortune, I marked early; Kate's presence--unluckily
+for _you_--is everything I could possibly wish; Kate's presence is, in
+short, as fine as you know, and I've been keeping it for the comfort of
+my declining years. I've watched it long; I've been saving it up and
+letting it, as you say of investments, appreciate, and you may judge
+whether, now it has begun to pay so, I'm likely to consent to treat for
+it with any but a high bidder. I can do the best with her, and I've my
+idea of the best."
+
+"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. "I didn't ask
+you to come to hear what it isn't--I asked you to come to hear what it
+is."
+
+"Of course," Densher laughed, "it's very great indeed."
+
+His hostess went on as if his contribution to the subject were barely
+relevant. "I want to see her high, high up--high up and in the light."
+
+"Ah, you naturally want to marry her to a duke, and are eager to smooth
+away any hitch."
+
+She gave him so, on this, the mere effect of the drawn blind that it
+quite forced him, at first, into the sense, possibly just, of having
+affected her as flip pant, perhaps even as low. He had been looked at
+so, in blighted moments of presumptuous youth, by big cold public men,
+but never, so far as he could recall, by any private lady. More than
+anything yet it gave him the measure of his companion's subtlety, and
+thereby of Kate's possible career. "Don't be _too_ impossible!"--he
+feared from his friend, for a moment, some such answer as that; and
+then felt, as she spoke otherwise, as if she were letting him off
+easily. "I want her to marry a great man." That was all; but, more and
+more, it was enough; and if it hadn't been her next words would have
+made it so. "And I think of her what I think. There you are."
+
+They sat for a little face to face upon it, and he was conscious of
+something deeper still, of something she wished him to understand if he
+only would. To that extent she did appeal--appealed to the intelligence
+she desired to show she believed him to possess. He was meanwhile, at
+all events, not the man wholly to fail of comprehension. "Of course I'm
+aware how little I can answer to any fond, proud dream. You've a
+view--a magnificent one; into which I perfectly enter. I thoroughly
+understand what I'm not, and I'm much obliged to you for not reminding
+me of it in any rougher way." She said nothing--she kept that up; it
+might even have been to let him go further, if he was capable of it, in
+the way of poorness of spirit. It was one of those cases in which a man
+couldn't show, if he showed at all, save for poor; unless indeed he
+preferred to show for asinine. It was the plain truth: he _was_--on
+Mrs. Lowder's basis, the only one in question--a very small quantity,
+and he did know, damnably, what made quantities large. He desired to be
+perfectly simple; yet in the midst of that effort a deeper apprehension
+throbbed. Aunt Maud clearly conveyed it, though he couldn't later on
+have said how. "You don't really matter, I believe, so much as you
+think, and I'm not going to make you a martyr by banishing you. Your
+performances with Kate in the Park are ridiculous so far as they're
+meant as consideration for me; and I had much rather see you
+myself--since you're, in your way, my dear young man, delightful--and
+arrange with you, count with you, as I easily, as I perfectly should.
+Do you suppose me so stupid as to quarrel with you if it's not really
+necessary? It won't--it would be too absurd!--_be_ necessary. I can
+bite your head off any day, any day I really open my mouth; and I'm
+dealing with you now, see--and successfully judge--without opening it.
+I do things handsomely all round--I place you in the presence of the
+plan with which, from the moment it's a case of taking you seriously,
+you're incompatible. Come then as near it as you like, walk all round
+it--don't be afraid you'll hurt it!--and live on with it before you."
+
+He afterwards felt that if she hadn't absolutely phrased all this it
+was because she so soon made him out as going with her far enough. He
+was so pleasantly affected by her asking no promise of him, her not
+proposing he should pay for her indulgence by his word of honour not to
+interfere, that he gave her a kind of general assurance of esteem.
+Immediately afterwards, then, he spoke of these things to Kate, and
+what then came back to him first of all was the way he had said to
+her--he mentioned it to the girl--very much as one of a pair of lovers
+says in a rupture by mutual consent: "I hope immensely, of course, that
+you'll always regard me as a friend." This had perhaps been going
+far--he submitted it all to Kate; but really there had been so much in
+it that it was to be looked at, as they might say, wholly in its own
+light. Other things than those we have presented had come up before the
+close of his scene with Aunt Maud, but this matter of her not treating
+him as a peril of the first order easily predominated. There was
+moreover plenty to talk about on the occasion of his subsequent passage
+with our young woman, it having been put to him abruptly, the night
+before, that he might give himself a lift and do his newspaper a
+service--so flatteringly was the case expressed--by going, for fifteen
+or twenty weeks, to America. The idea of a series of letters from the
+United States from the strictly social point of view had for some time
+been nursed in the inner sanctuary at whose door he sat, and the moment
+was now deemed happy for letting it loose. The imprisoned thought had,
+in a word, on the opening of the door, flown straight out into
+Densher's face, or perched at least on his shoulder, making him look up
+in surprise from his mere inky office-table. His account of the matter
+to Kate was that he couldn't refuse--not being in a position, as yet,
+to refuse anything; but that his being chosen for such an errand
+confounded his sense of proportion. He was definite as to his scarce
+knowing how to measure the honour, which struck him as equivocal; he
+had not quite supposed himself the man for the class of job. This
+confused consciousness, he intimated, he had promptly enough betrayed
+to his manager; with the effect, however, of seeing the question
+surprisingly clear up. What it came to was that the sort of twaddle
+that was not in his chords was, unexpectedly, just what they happened
+this time not to want. They wanted his letters, for queer reasons,
+about as good as he could let them come; he was to play his own little
+tune and not be afraid; that was the whole point.
+
+It would have been the whole, that is, had there not been a sharper one
+still in the circumstance that he was to start at once. His mission, as
+they called it at the office, would probably be over by the end of
+June, which was desirable; but to bring that about he must now not lose
+a week; his inquiries, he understood, were to cover the whole ground,
+and there were reasons of State--reasons operating at the seat of
+empire in Fleet Street--why the nail should be struck on the head.
+Densher made no secret to Kate of his having asked for a day to decide;
+and his account of that matter was that he felt he owed it to her to
+speak to her first. She assured him on this that nothing so much as
+that scruple had yet shown her how they were bound together; she was
+clearly proud of his letting a thing of such importance depend on her;
+but she was clearer still as to his instant duty. She rejoiced in his
+prospect and urged him to his task; she should miss him intensely--of
+course she should miss him; but she made so little of it that she spoke
+with jubilation of what he would see and would do. She made so much of
+this last quantity that he laughed at her innocence, though also with
+scarce the heart to give her the real size of his drop in the daily
+bucket. He was struck at the same time with her happy grasp of what had
+really occurred in Fleet Street--all the more that it was his own final
+reading. He was to pull the subject up--that was just what they wanted;
+and it would take more than all the United States together, visit them
+each as he might, to let _him_ down. It was just because he didn't nose
+about and wasn't the usual gossipmonger that they had picked him out;
+it was a branch of their correspondence with which they evidently
+wished a new tone associated, such a tone as, from now on, it would
+have always to take from his example.
+
+"How you ought indeed, when you understand so well, to be a
+journalist's wife!" Densher exclaimed in admiration, even while she
+struck him as fairly hurrying him off.
+
+But she was almost impatient of the praise. "What do you expect one
+_not_ to understand when one cares for you?"
+
+"Ah then, I'll put it otherwise and say 'How much you care for me!'"
+
+"Yes," she assented; "it fairly redeems my stupidity. I _shall,_ with a
+chance to show it," she added, "have some imagination for you."
+
+She spoke of the future this time as so little contingent, that he felt
+a queerness of conscience in making her the report that he presently
+arrived at on what had passed for him with the real arbiter of their
+destiny. The way for that had been blocked a little by his news from
+Fleet Street; but in the crucible of their happy discussion this
+element soon melted into the other, and in the mixture that ensued the
+parts were not to be distinguished. The young man moreover, before
+taking his leave, was to see why Kate had just spoken of the future as
+if they now really possessed it, and was to come to the vision by a
+devious way that deepened the final cheer. Their faces were turned to
+the illumined quarter as soon as he had answered her question in
+respect to the appearance of their being able to play a waiting game
+with success. It was for the possibility of that appearance that she
+had, a few days before, so earnestly pressed him to see her aunt; and
+if after his hour with that lady it had not struck Densher that he had
+seen her to the happiest purpose the poor facts flushed with a better
+meaning as Kate, one by one, took them up.
+
+"If she consents to your coming, why isn't that everything?"
+
+"It _is_ everything; everything _she_ thinks it. It's the
+probability--I mean as Mrs. Lowder measures probability--that I may be
+prevented from becoming a complication for her by some arrangement,
+_any_ arrangement, through which you shall see me often and easily.
+She's sure of my want of money, and that gives her time. She believes
+in my having a certain amount of delicacy, in my wishing to better my
+state before I put the pistol to your head in respect to sharing it.
+The time that will take figures for her as the time that will help her
+if she doesn't spoil her chance by treating me badly. She doesn't at
+all wish moreover," Densher went on, "to treat me badly, for I believe,
+upon my honour, funny as it may sound to you, that she personally
+rather likes me, and that if you weren't in question I might almost
+become her pet young man. She doesn't disparage intellect and
+culture--quite the contrary; she wants them to adorn her board and be
+named in her programme; and I'm sure it has sometimes cost her a real
+pang that I should be so desirable, at once, and so impossible." He
+paused a moment, and his companion then saw that a strange smile was in
+his face--a smile as strange even as the adjunct, in her own, of this
+informing vision. "I quite suspect her of believing that, if the truth
+were known, she likes me literally better than--deep down--you yourself
+do: wherefore she does me the honour to think that I may be safely left
+to kill my own cause. There, as I say, comes in her margin. I'm not the
+sort of stuff of romance that wears, that washes, that survives use,
+that resists familiarity. Once in any degree admit that, and your pride
+and prejudice will take care of the rest! the pride fed full,
+meanwhile, by the system she means to practise with you, and the
+prejudice excited by the comparison she'll enable you to make, from
+which I shall come off badly. She likes me, but she'll never like me so
+much as when she succeeded a little better in making me look wretched.
+For then _you'll_ like me less."
+
+Kate showed for this evocation a due interest, but no alarm; and it was
+a little as if to pay his tender cynicism back in kind that she after
+an instant replied: "I see, I see; what an immense affair she must
+think me! One was aware, but you deepen the impression."
+
+"I think you'll make no mistake," said Densher, "in letting it go as
+deep as it will."
+
+He had given her indeed, she made no scruple of showing, plenty to
+consider. "Her facing the music, her making you boldly as welcome as
+you say--that's an awfully big theory, you know, and worthy of all the
+other big things that, in one's acquaintance with people, give her a
+place so apart."
+
+"Oh, she's grand," the young man conceded; "she's on the scale,
+altogether, of the car of Juggernaut which was a kind of image that
+came to me yesterday while I waited for her at Lancaster Gate. The
+things in your drawing-room there were like the forms of the strange
+idols, the mystic excrescences, with which one may suppose the front of
+the car to bristle."
+
+"Yes, aren't they?" the girl returned; and they had, over all that
+aspect of their wonderful lady, one of those deep and free interchanges
+that made everything but confidence a false note for them. There were
+complications, there were questions; but they were so much more
+together than they were anything else. Kate uttered for a while no word
+of refutation of Aunt Maud's "big" diplomacy, and they left it there,
+as they would have left any other fine product, for a monument to her
+powers. But, Densher related further, he had had in other respects too
+the car of Juggernaut to face; he omitted nothing from his account of
+his visit, least of all the way Aunt Maud had frankly at last--though
+indeed only under artful pressure--fallen foul of his very type, his
+want of the right marks, his foreign accidents, his queer antecedents.
+She had told him he was but half a Briton, which, he granted Kate,
+would have been dreadful if he hadn't so let himself in for it.
+
+"I was really curious, you see," he explained, "to find out from her
+what sort of queer creature, what sort of social anomaly, in the light
+of such conventions as hers, such an education as mine makes one pass
+for."
+
+Kate said nothing for a little; but then, "Why should you care?" she
+asked.
+
+"Oh," he laughed, "I like her so much; and then, for a man of my trade,
+her views, her spirit, are essentially a thing to get hold of; they
+belong to the great public mind that we meet at every turn and that we
+must keep setting up 'codes' with. Besides," he added, "I want to
+please her personally."
+
+"Ah, yes, we must please her personally!" his companion echoed; and the
+words may represent all their definite recognition, at the time, of
+Densher's politic gain. They had in fact between this and his start for
+New York many matters to handle, and the question he now touched upon
+came up for Kate above all. She looked at him as if he had really told
+her aunt more of his immediate personal story than he had ever told
+herself. That, if it were so, was an accident, and it put him, for half
+an hour, on as much of the picture of his early years abroad, his
+migratory parents, his Swiss schools, his German university, as she had
+easy attention for. A man, he intimated, a man of their world, would
+have spotted him straight as to many of these points; a man of their
+world, so far as they had a world, would have been through the English
+mill. But it was none the less charming to make his confession to a
+woman; women had, in fact, for such differences, so much more
+imagination. Kate showed at present all his case could require; when
+she had had it from beginning to end she declared that she now made out
+more than ever yet of what she loved him for. She had herself, as a
+child, lived with some continuity in the world across the Channel,
+coming home again still a child; and had participated after that, in
+her teens, in her mother's brief but repeated retreats to Dresden, to
+Florence, to Biarritz, weak and expensive attempts at economy from
+which there stuck to her--though in general coldly expressed, through
+the instinctive avoidance of cheap raptures--the religion of foreign
+things. When it was revealed to her how many more foreign things were
+in Merton Densher than he had hitherto taken the trouble to catalogue,
+she almost faced him as if he were a map of the continent or a handsome
+present of a delightful new "Murray." He hadn't meant to swagger, he
+had rather meant to plead, though with Mrs. Lowder he had meant also a
+little to explain. His father had been, in strange countries, in twenty
+settlements of the English, British chaplain, resident or occasional,
+and had had for years the unusual luck of never wanting a billet. His
+career abroad had therefore been unbroken, and, as his stipend had
+never been great, he had educated his children at the smallest cost, in
+the schools nearest; which was also a saving of railway fares.
+Densher's mother, it further appeared, had practised on her side a
+distinguished industry, to the success of which--so far as success ever
+crowned it--this period of exile had much contributed: she copied,
+patient lady, famous pictures in great museums, having begun with a
+happy natural gift and taking in betimes the scale of her opportunity.
+Copyists abroad of course swarmed, but Mrs. Densher had had a sense and
+a hand of her own, had arrived at a perfection that persuaded, that
+even deceived, and that made the disposal of her work blissfully usual.
+Her son, who had lost her, held her image sacred, and the effect of his
+telling Kate all about her, as well as about other matters until then
+mixed and dim, was to render his history rich, his sources full, his
+outline anything but common. He had come round, he had come back, he
+insisted abundantly, to being a Briton: his Cambridge years, his happy
+connection, as it had proved, with his father's college, amply
+certified to that, to say nothing of his subsequent plunge into London,
+which filled up the measure. But brave enough though his descent to
+English earth, he had passed, by the way, through zones of air that had
+left their ruffle on his wings, had been exposed to initiations
+ineffaceable. Something had happened to him that could never be undone.
+
+When Kate Croy said to him as much he besought her not to insist,
+declaring that this indeed was what was too much the matter with him,
+that he had been but too probably spoiled for native, for insular use.
+On which, not unnaturally, she insisted the more, assuring him, without
+mitigation, that if he was complicated and brilliant she wouldn't for
+the world have had him any thing less; so that he was reduced in the
+end to accusing her of putting the dreadful truth to him in the hollow
+guise of flattery. She was making out how abnormal he was in order that
+she might eventually find him impossible; and, as she could fully make
+it out but with his aid, she had to bribe him by feigned delight to
+help her. If her last word for him, in the connection, was that the way
+he saw himself was just a precious proof the more of his having tasted
+of the tree and being thereby prepared to assist her to eat, this gives
+the happy tone of their whole talk, the measure of the flight of time
+in the near presence of his settled departure. Kate showed, however,
+that she was to be more literally taken when she spoke of the relief
+Aunt Maud would draw from the prospect of his absence.
+
+"Yet one can scarcely see why," he replied, "when she fears me so
+little."
+
+His friend weighed his objection. "Your idea is that she likes you so
+much that she'll even go so far as to regret losing you?"
+
+Well, he saw it in their constant comprehensive way. "Since what she
+builds on is the gradual process of your alienation, she may take the
+view that the process constantly requires me. Mustn't I be there to
+keep it going? It's in my exile that it may languish."
+
+He went on with that fantasy, but at this point Kate ceased to attend.
+He saw after a little that she had been following some thought of her
+own, and he had been feeling the growth of something determinant even
+through the extravagance of much of the pleasantry, the warm,
+transparent irony, into which their livelier intimacy kept plunging
+like a confident swimmer. Suddenly she said to him with extraordinary
+beauty: "I engage myself to you for ever."
+
+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; I give you every drop of my life."
+That was all, for the moment, but it was enough, and it was almost as
+quiet as if it were nothing. They were in the open air, in an alley of
+the Gardens; the great space, which seemed to arch just then higher and
+spread wider for them, threw them back into deep concentration. They
+moved by a common instinct to a spot, within sight, that struck them as
+fairly sequestered, and there, before their time together was spent,
+they had extorted from concentration every advance it could make them.
+They had exchanged vows and tokens, sealed their rich compact,
+solemnized, so far as breathed words and murmured sounds and lighted
+eyes and clasped hands could do it, their agreement to belong only, and
+to belong tremendously, to each other. They were to leave the place
+accordingly an affianced couple; but before they left it other things
+still had passed. Densher had declared his horror of bringing to a
+premature end her happy relation with her aunt; and they had worked
+round together to a high level of wisdom and patience. Kate's free
+profession was that she wished not to deprive _him_ of Mrs. Lowder's
+countenance, which, in the long run, she was convinced he would
+continue to enjoy; and as, by a blessed turn, Aunt Maud had demanded of
+him no promise that would tie his hands, they should be able to
+cultivate their destiny in their own way and yet remain loyal. One
+difficulty alone stood out, which Densher named.
+
+"Of course it will never do--we must remember that--from the moment you
+allow her to found hopes of you for any one else in particular. So long
+as her view is content to remain as general as at present appears, I
+don't see that we deceive her. At a given moment, you see, she must be
+undeceived: the only thing therefore is to be ready for the moment and
+to face it. Only, after all, in that case," the young man observed,
+"one doesn't quite make out what we shall have got from her."
+
+"What she'll have got from _us?"_ Kate inquired with a smile. "What
+she'll have got from us," the girl went on, "is her own affair--it's
+for _her_ to measure. I asked her for nothing," she added; "I never put
+myself upon her. She must take her risks, and she surely understands
+them. What we shall have got from her is what we've already spoken of,"
+Kate further explained; "it's that we shall have gained time. And so,
+for that matter, will she."
+
+Densher gazed a little at all this clearness; his gaze was not at the
+present hour into romantic obscurity. "Yes; no doubt, in our particular
+situation, time's everything. And then there's the joy of it."
+
+She hesitated. "Of our secret?"
+
+"Not so much perhaps of our secret in itself, but of what's represented
+and, as we must somehow feel, protected and made deeper and closer by
+it." And his fine face, relaxed into happiness, covered her with all
+his meaning. "Our being as we are."
+
+It was as if for a moment she let the meaning sink into her. "So gone?"
+
+"So gone. So extremely gone. However," he smiled, "we shall go a good
+deal further." Her answer to which was only the softness of her
+silence--a silence that looked out for them both at the far reach of
+their prospect. This was immense, and they thus took final possession
+of it. They were practically united and they were splendidly strong;
+but there were other things--things they were precisely strong enough
+to be able successfully to count with and safely to allow for; in
+consequence of which they would, for the present, subject to some
+better reason, keep their understanding to themselves. It was not
+indeed, however, till after one more observation of Densher's that they
+felt the question completely straightened out. "The only thing of
+course is that she may any day absolutely put it to you."
+
+Kate considered. "Ask me where, on my honour, we are? She may,
+naturally; but I doubt if in fact she will. While you're away she'll
+make the most of it. She'll leave me alone."
+
+"But there'll be my letters."
+
+The girl faced his letters. "Very, very many?"
+
+"Very, very, very many--more than ever; and you know what that is! And
+then," Densher added, "there'll be yours."
+
+"Oh, I shan't leave mine on the hall-table. I shall post them myself."
+
+He looked at her a moment. "Do you think then I had best address you
+elsewhere?" After which, before she could quite answer, he added with
+some emphasis: "I'd rather not, you know. It's straighter."
+
+She might again have just waited. "Of course it's straighter. Don't be
+afraid I shan't be straight. Address me," she continued, "where you
+like. I shall be proud enough of its being known you write to me."
+
+He turned it over for the last clearness. "Even at the risk of its
+really bringing down the inquisition?"
+
+Well, the last clearness now filled her. "I'm not afraid of the
+inquisition. If she asks if there's anything definite between us, I
+know perfectly what I shall say."
+
+"That I _am,_ of course, 'gone' for you?"
+
+"That I love you as I shall never in my life love any one else, and
+that she can make what she likes of that." She said it out so
+splendidly that it was like a new profession of faith, the fulness of a
+tide breaking through; and the effect of that, in turn, was to make her
+companion meet her with such eyes that she had time again before he
+could otherwise speak. "Besides, she's just as likely to ask _you."_
+
+"Not while I'm away."
+
+"Then when you come back."
+
+"Well then," said Densher, "we shall have had our particular joy. But
+what I feel is," he candidly added, "that, by an idea of her own, her
+superior policy, she _won't_ ask me. She'll let me off. I shan't have
+to lie to her."
+
+"It will be left all to me?" asked Kate.
+
+"All to you!" he tenderly laughed.
+
+But it was, oddly, the very next moment as if he had perhaps been a
+shade too candid. His discrimination seemed to mark a possible, a
+natural reality, a reality not wholly disallowed by the account the
+girl had just given of her own intention. There _was_ a difference in
+the air--even if none other than the supposedly usual difference in
+truth between man and woman; and it was almost as if the sense of this
+provoked her. She seemed to cast about an instant, and then she went
+back a little resentfully to something she had suffered to pass a
+minute before. She appeared to take up rather more seriously than she
+need the joke about her freedom to deceive. Yet she did this too in a
+beautiful way. "Men are too stupid--even you. You didn't understand
+just now why, if I post my letters myself, it won't be for any thing so
+vulgar as to hide them."
+
+"Oh, you said--for the pleasure."
+
+"Yes; but you didn't, you don't understand what the pleasure may be.
+There are refinements----!" she more patiently dropped. "I mean of
+consciousness, of sensation, of appreciation," she went on. "No," she
+sadly insisted--_"men_ don't know. They know, in such matters, almost
+nothing but what women show them."
+
+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!"
+
+
+
+
+BOOK THIRD
+
+V
+
+
+The two ladies who, in advance of the Swiss season, had been warned
+that their design was unconsidered, that the passes would not be clear,
+nor the air mild, nor the inns open--the two ladies who,
+characteristically, had braved a good deal of possibly interested
+remonstrance were finding themselves, as their adventure turned out,
+wonderfully sustained. It was the judgment of the head-waiters and
+other functionaries on the Italian lakes that approved itself now as
+interested; they themselves had been conscious of impatiences, of
+bolder dreams--at least the younger had; so that one of the things they
+made out together--making out as they did an endless variety--was that
+in those operatic palaces of the Villa d'Este, of Cadenabbia, of
+Pallanza and Stresa, lone women, however reinforced by a
+travelling-library of instructive volumes, were apt to be beguiled and
+undone. Their flights of fancy moreover had been modest; they had for
+instance risked nothing vital in hoping to make their way by the
+Bruenig. They were making it in fact happily enough as we meet them, and
+were only wishing that, for the wondrous beauty of the early
+high-climbing spring, it might have been longer and the places to pause
+and rest more numerous.
+
+Such at least had been the intimated attitude of Mrs. Stringham, the
+elder of the companions, who had her own view of the impatiences of the
+younger, to which, however, she offered an opposition but of the most
+circuitous. She moved, the admirable Mrs. Stringham, in a fine cloud of
+observation and suspicion; she was in the position, as she believed, of
+knowing much more about Milly Theale than Milly herself knew, and yet
+of having to darken her knowledge as well as make it active. The woman
+in the world least formed by nature, as she was quite aware, for
+duplicities and labyrinths, she found herself dedicated to personal
+subtlety by a new set of circumstances, above all by a new personal
+relation; had now in fact to recognise that an education in the
+occult--she could scarce say what to call it--had begun for her the day
+she left New York with Mildred. She had come on from Boston for that
+purpose; had seen little of the girl--or rather had seen her but
+briefly, for Mrs. Stringham, when she saw anything at all, saw much,
+saw everything--before accepting her proposal; and had accordingly
+placed herself, by her act, in a boat that she more and more estimated
+as, humanly speaking, of the biggest, though likewise, no doubt, in
+many ways, by reason of its size, of the safest. In Boston, the winter
+before, the young lady in whom we are interested had, on the spot,
+deeply, yet almost tacitly, appealed to her, dropped into her mind the
+shy conceit of some assistance, some devotion to render. Mrs.
+Stringham's little life had often been visited by shy conceits--secret
+dreams that had fluttered their hour between its narrow walls without,
+for any great part, so much as mustering courage to look out of its
+rather dim windows. But this imagination--the fancy of a possible link
+with the remarkable young thing from New York--_had_ mustered courage:
+had perched, on the instant, at the clearest look-out it could find,
+and might be said to have remained there till, only a few months later,
+it had caught, in surprise and joy, the unmistakable flash of a signal.
+
+Milly Theale had Boston friends, such as they were, and of recent
+making; and it was understood that her visit to them--a visit that was
+not to be meagre--had been undertaken, after a series of bereavements,
+in the interest of the particular peace that New York could not give.
+It was recognised, liberally enough, that there were many
+things--perhaps even too many--New York _could_ give; but this was felt
+to make no difference in the constant fact that what you had most to
+do, under the discipline of life, or of death, was really to feel your
+situation as grave. Boston could help you to that as nothing else
+could, and it had extended to Milly, by every presumption, some such
+measure of assistance. Mrs. Stringham was never to forget--for the
+moment had not faded, nor the infinitely fine vibration it set up in
+any degree ceased--her own first sight of the striking apparition, then
+unheralded and unexplained: the slim, constantly pale, delicately
+haggard, anomalously, agreeably angular young person, of not more than
+two-and-twenty in spite of her marks, whose hair was some how
+exceptionally red even for the real thing, which it innocently
+confessed to being, and whose clothes were remarkably black even for
+robes of mourning, which was the meaning they expressed. It was New
+York mourning, it was New York hair, it was a New York history,
+confused as yet, but multitudinous, of the loss of parents, brothers,
+sisters, almost every human appendage, all on a scale and with a sweep
+that had required the greater stage; it was a New York legend of
+affecting, of romantic isolation, and, beyond everything, it was by
+most accounts, in respect to the mass of money so piled on the girl's
+back, a set of New York possibilities. She was alone, she was stricken,
+she was rich, and, in particular, she was strange--a combination in
+itself of a nature to engage Mrs. Stringham's attention. But it was the
+strangeness that most determined our good lady's sympathy, convinced as
+she was that it was much greater than any one else--any one but the
+sole Susan Stringham--supposed. Susan privately settled it that Boston
+was not in the least seeing her, was only occupied with her seeing
+Boston, and that any assumed affinity between the two characters was
+delusive and vain. She was seeing her, and she had quite the deepest
+moment of her life in now obeying the instinct to conceal the vision.
+She couldn't explain it--no one would understand. They would say clever
+Boston things--Mrs. Stringham was from Burlington, Vermont, which she
+boldly upheld as the real heart of New England, Boston being "too far
+south"--but they would only darken counsel.
+
+There could be no better proof, than this quick intellectual split, of
+the impression made on our friend, who shone, herself, she was well
+aware, with but the reflected light of the admirable city. She too had
+had her discipline, but it had not made her striking; it had been
+prosaically usual, though doubtless a decent dose; and had only made
+her usual to match it--usual, that is, as Boston went. She had lost
+first her husband, and then her mother, with whom, on her husband's
+death, she had lived again; so that now, childless, she was but more
+sharply single than before. But she sat rather coldly light, having, as
+she called it, enough to live on--so far, that is, as she lived by
+bread alone: how little indeed she was regularly content with that diet
+appeared from the name she had made--Susan Shepherd Stringham--as a
+contributor to the best magazines. She wrote short stories, and she
+fondly believed she had her "note," the art of showing New England
+without showing it wholly in the kitchen. She had not herself been
+brought up in the kitchen; she knew others who had not; and to speak
+for them had thus become with her a literary mission. To _be_ in truth
+literary had ever been her dearest thought, the thought that kept her
+bright little nippers perpetually in position. There were masters,
+models, celebrities, mainly foreign, whom she finely accounted so and
+in whose light she ingeniously laboured; there were others whom,
+however chattered about, she ranked with the inane, for she was full of
+discrimination; but all categories failed her--they ceased at least to
+signify--as soon as she found herself in presence of the real thing,
+the romantic life itself. That was what she saw in Mildred--what
+positively made her hand a while tremble too much for the pen. She had
+had, it seemed to her, a revelation--such as even New England refined
+and grammatical couldn't give; and, all made up as she was of small
+neat memories and ingenuities, little industries and ambitions, mixed
+with something moral, personal, that was still more intensely
+responsive, she felt her new friend would have done her an ill turn if
+their friendship shouldn't develop, and yet that nothing would be left
+of anything else if it should. It was for the surrender of everything
+else that she was, however, quite prepared, and while she went about
+her usual Boston business with her usual Boston probity she was really
+all the while holding herself. She wore her "handsome" felt hat, so
+Tyrolese, yet some how, though feathered from the eagle's wing, so
+truly domestic, with the same straightness and security; she attached
+her fur boa with the same honest precautions; she preserved her balance
+on the ice-slopes with the same practised skill; she opened, each
+evening, her "Transcript" with the same interfusion of suspense and
+resignation; she attended her almost daily concert with the same
+expenditure of patience and the same economy of passion; she flitted in
+and out of the Public Library with the air of conscientiously returning
+or bravely carrying off in her pocket the key of knowledge itself; and
+finally--it was what she most did--she watched the thin trickle of a
+fictive "love-interest" through that somewhat serpentine channel, in
+the magazines, which she mainly managed to keep clear for it. But the
+real thing, all the while, was elsewhere; the real thing had gone back
+to New York, leaving behind it the two unsolved questions, quite
+distinct, of why it _was_ real, and whether she should ever be so near
+it again.
+
+For the figure to which these questions attached themselves she had
+found a convenient description--she thought of it for herself, always,
+as that of a girl with a background. The great reality was in the fact
+that, very soon, after but two or three meetings, the girl with the
+background, the girl with the crown of old gold and the mourning that
+was not as the mourning of Boston, but at once more rebellious in its
+gloom and more frivolous in its frills, had told her she had never seen
+any one like her. They had met thus as opposed curiosities, and that
+simple remark of Milly's--if simple it was--became the most important
+thing that had ever happened to her; it deprived the love-interest, for
+the time, of actuality and even of pertinence; it moved her first, in
+short, in a high degree, to gratitude, and then to no small compassion.
+Yet in respect to this relation at least it was what did prove the key
+of knowledge; it lighted up as nothing else could do the poor young
+woman's history. That the potential heiress of all the ages should
+never have seen any one like a mere typical subscriber, after all, to
+the "Transcript" was a truth that--in especial as announced with
+modesty, with humility, with regret--described a situation. It laid
+upon the elder woman, as to the void to be filled, a weight of
+responsibility; but in particular it led her to ask whom poor Mildred
+_had_ then seen, and what range of contacts it had taken to produce
+such queer surprises. That was really the inquiry that had ended by
+clearing the air: the key of knowledge was felt to click in the lock
+from the moment it flashed upon Mrs. Stringham that her friend had been
+starved for culture. Culture was what she herself represented for her,
+and it was living up to that principle that would surely prove the
+great business. She knew, the clever lady, what the principle itself
+represented, and the limits of her own store; and a certain alarm would
+have grown upon her if something else hadn't grown faster.
+
+This was, fortunately for her--and we give it in her own words--the
+sense of a harrowing pathos. That, primarily, was what appealed to her,
+what seemed to open the door of romance for her still wider than any,
+than a still more reckless, connection with the "picture-papers." For
+such was essentially the point: it was rich, romantic, abysmal, to
+have, as was evident, thousands and thousands a year, to have youth and
+intelligence and if not beauty, at least, in equal measure, a high,
+dim, charming, ambiguous oddity, which was even better, and then on top
+of all to enjoy boundless freedom, the freedom of the wind in the
+desert--it was unspeakably touching to be so equipped and yet to have
+been reduced by fortune to little humble-minded mistakes.
+
+It brought our friend's imagination back again to New York, where
+aberrations were so possible in the intellectual sphere, and it in fact
+caused a visit she presently paid there to overflow with interest. As
+Milly had beautifully invited her, so she would hold out if she could
+against the strain of so much confidence in her mind; and the
+remarkable thing was that even at the end of three weeks she _had_ held
+out. But by this time her mind had grown comparatively bold and free;
+it was dealing with new quantities, a different proportion
+altogether--and that had made for refreshment: she had accordingly gone
+home in convenient possession of her subject. New York was vast, New
+York was startling, with strange histories, with wild cosmopolite
+backward generations that accounted for anything; and to have got
+nearer the luxuriant tribe of which the rare creature was the final
+flower, the immense, extravagant, unregulated cluster, with free-living
+ancestors, handsome dead cousins, lurid uncles, beautiful vanished
+aunts, persons all busts and curls, preserved, though so exposed, in
+the marble of famous French chisels--all this, to say nothing of the
+effect of closer growths of the stem, was to have had one's small
+world-space both crowded and enlarged. Our couple had at all events
+effected an exchange; the elder friend had been as consciously
+intellectual as possible, and the younger, abounding in personal
+revelation, had been as unconsciously distinguished. This was
+poetry--it was also history--Mrs. Stringham thought, to a finer tune
+even than Maeterlink and Pater, than Marbot and Gregorovius. She
+appointed occasions for the reading of these authors with her hostess,
+rather perhaps than actually achieved great spans; but what they
+managed and what they missed speedily sank for her into the dim depths
+of the merely relative, so quickly, so strongly had she clutched her
+central clue. All her scruples and hesitations, all her anxious
+enthusiasms, had reduced themselves to a single alarm--the fear that
+she really might act on her companion clumsily and coarsely. She was
+positively afraid of what she might do to her, and to avoid that, to
+avoid it with piety and passion, to do, rather, nothing at all, to
+leave her untouched because no touch one could apply, however light,
+however just, however earnest and anxious, would be half good enough,
+would be anything but an ugly smutch upon perfection--this now imposed
+itself as a consistent, an inspiring thought.
+
+Less than a month after the event that had so determined Mrs.
+Stringham's attitude--close upon the heels, that is, of her return from
+New York--she was reached by a proposal that brought up for her the
+kind of question her delicacy might have to contend with. Would she
+start for Europe with her young friend at the earliest possible date,
+and should she be willing to do so without making conditions? The
+inquiry was launched by wire; explanations, in sufficiency, were
+promised; extreme urgency was suggested, and a general surrender
+invited. It was to the honour of her sincerity that she made the
+surrender on the spot, though it was not perhaps altogether to that of
+her logic. She had wanted, very consciously, from the first, to give
+something up for her new acquaintance, but she had now no doubt that
+she was practically giving up all. What settled this was the fulness of
+a particular impression, the impression that had throughout more and
+more supported her and which she would have uttered so far as she might
+by saying that the charm of the creature was positively in the
+creature's greatness. She would have been content so to leave it;
+unless indeed she had said, more familiarly, that Mildred was the
+biggest impression of her life. That was at all events the biggest
+account of her, and none but a big, clearly, would do. Her situation,
+as such things were called, was on the grand scale; but it still was
+not that. It was her nature, once for all--a nature that reminded Mrs.
+Stringham of the term always used in the newspapers about the great new
+steamers, the inordinate number of "feet of water" they drew; so that
+if, in your little boat, you had chosen to hover and approach, you had
+but yourself to thank, when once motion was started, for the way the
+draught pulled you. Milly drew the feet of water, and odd though it
+might seem that a lonely girl, who was not robust and who hated sound
+and show, should stir the stream like a leviathan, her companion
+floated off with the sense of rocking violently at her side. More than
+prepared, however, for that excitement, Mrs. Stringham mainly failed of
+ease in respect to her own consistency. To attach herself for an
+indefinite time seemed a roundabout way of holding her hands off. If
+she wished to be sure of neither touching nor smutching, the straighter
+plan would doubtless have been not to keep her friend within reach.
+This in fact she fully recognised, and with it the degree to which she
+desired that the girl should lead her life, a life certain to be so
+much finer than that of anybody else. The difficulty, however, by good
+fortune, cleared away as soon as she had further recognised, as she was
+speedily able to do, that she, Susan Shepherd--the name with which
+Milly for the most part amused herself--was _not_ anybody else. She had
+renounced that character; she had now no life to lead; and she honestly
+believed that she was thus supremely equipped for leading Milly's own.
+No other person whatever, she was sure, had to an equal degree this
+qualification, and it was really to assert it that she fondly embarked.
+
+Many things, though not in many weeks, had come and gone since then,
+and one of the best of them, doubtless, had been the voyage itself, by
+the happy southern course, to the succession of Mediterranean ports,
+with the dazzled wind-up at Naples. Two or three others had preceded
+this; incidents, indeed rather lively marks, of their last fortnight at
+home, and one of which had determined on Mrs. Stringham's part a rush
+to New York, forty-eight breathless hours there, previous to her final
+rally. But the great sustained sea-light had drunk up the rest of the
+picture, so that for many days other questions and other possibilities
+sounded with as little effect as a trio of penny whistles might sound
+in a Wagner overture. It was the Wagner overture that practically
+prevailed, up through Italy, where Milly had already been, still
+further up and across the Alps, which were also partly known to Mrs.
+Stringham; only perhaps "taken" to a time not wholly congruous, hurried
+in fact on account of the girl's high restlessness. She had been
+expected, she had frankly promised, to be restless--that was partly why
+she was "great"--or was a consequence, at any rate, if not a cause; yet
+she had not perhaps altogether announced herself as straining so hard
+at the cord. It was familiar, it was beautiful to Mrs. Stringham that
+she had arrears to make up, the chances that had lapsed for her through
+the wanton ways of forefathers fond of Paris, but not of its higher
+sides, and fond almost of nothing else; but the vagueness, the
+openness, the eagerness without point and the interest without
+pause--all a part of the charm of her oddity as at first presented--had
+become more striking in proportion as they triumphed over movement and
+change. She had arts and idiosyncrasies of which no great account could
+have been given, but which were a daily grace if you lived with them;
+such as the art of being almost tragically impatient and yet making it
+as light as air; of being inexplicably sad and yet making it as clear
+as noon; of being unmistakably gay, and yet making it as soft as dusk.
+Mrs. Stringham by this time understood everything, was more than ever
+confirmed in wonder and admiration, in her view that it was life enough
+simply to feel her companion's feelings; but there were special keys
+she had not yet added to her bunch, impressions that, of a sudden, were
+apt to affect her as new.
+
+This particular day on the great Swiss road had been, for some reason,
+full of them, and they referred themselves, provisionally, to some
+deeper depth than she had touched--though into two or three such
+depths, it must be added, she had peeped long enough to find herself
+suddenly draw back. It was not Milly's unpacified state, in short, that
+now troubled her--though certainly, as Europe was the great American
+sedative, the failure was to some extent to be noted: it was the
+suspected presence of something behind it--which, however, could
+scarcely have taken its place there since their departure. What any
+fresh motive of unrest could suddenly have sprung from was, in short,
+not to be divined. It was but half an explanation to say that
+excitement, for each of them, had naturally dropped, and that what they
+had left behind, or tried to--the great serious facts of life, as Mrs.
+Stringham liked to call them--was once more coming into sight as
+objects loom through smoke when smoke begins to clear; for these were
+general appearances from which the girl's own aspect, her really larger
+vagueness, seemed rather to disconnect itself. The nearest approach to
+a personal anxiety indulged in as yet by the elder lady was on her
+taking occasion to wonder if what she had more than anything else got
+hold of mightn't be one of the finer, one of the finest, one of the
+rarest--as she called it so that she might call it nothing worse--cases
+of American intensity. She had just had a moment of alarm--asked
+herself if her young friend were merely going to treat her to some
+complicated drama of nerves. At the end of a week, however, with their
+further progress, her young friend had effectively answered the
+question and given her the impression, indistinct indeed as yet, of
+something that had a reality compared with which the nervous
+explanation would have been coarse. Mrs. Stringham found herself from
+that hour, in other words, in presence of an explanation that remained
+a muffled and intangible form, but that, assuredly, should it take on
+sharpness, would explain everything and more than everything, would
+become instantly the light in which Milly was to be read.
+
+Such a matter as this may at all events speak of the style in which our
+young woman could affect those who were near her, may testify to the
+sort of interest she could inspire. She worked--and seemingly quite
+without design--upon the sympathy, the curiosity, the fancy of her
+associates, and we shall really ourselves scarce otherwise come closer
+to her than by feeling their impression and sharing, if need be, their
+confusion. She reduced them, Mrs. Stringham would have said, reduced
+them to a consenting bewilderment; which was precisely, for that good
+lady, on a last analysis, what was most in harmony with her greatness.
+She exceeded, escaped measure, was surprising only because _they_ were
+so far from great. Thus it was that on this wondrous day on the Bruenig
+the spell of watching her had grown more than ever irresistible; a
+proof of what--or of a part of what--Mrs. Stringham had, with all the
+rest, been reduced to. She had almost the sense of tracking her young
+friend as if at a given moment to pounce. She knew she shouldn't
+pounce, she hadn't come out to pounce; yet she felt her attention
+secretive, all the same, and her observation scientific. She struck
+herself as hovering like a spy, applying tests, laying traps,
+concealing signs. This would last, however, only till she should fairly
+know what was the matter; and to watch was, after all, meanwhile, a way
+of clinging to the girl, not less than an occupation, a satisfaction in
+itself. The pleasure of watching, moreover, if a reason were needed,
+came from a sense of her beauty. Her beauty hadn't at all originally
+seemed a part of the situation, and Mrs. Stringham had, even in the
+first flush of friendship, not named it, grossly, to any one; having
+seen early that, for stupid people--and who, she sometimes secretly
+asked herself, wasn't stupid?--it would take a great deal of
+explaining. She had learned not to mention it till it was mentioned
+first--which occasionally happened, but not too often; and then she was
+there in force. Then she both warmed to the perception that met her own
+perception, and disputed it, suspiciously, as to special items; while,
+in general, she had learned to refine even to the point of herself
+employing the word that most people employed. She employed it to
+pretend that she was also stupid and so have done with the matter;
+spoke of her friend as plain, as ugly even, in a case of especially
+dense insistence; but as, in appearance, so "awfully full of things."
+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 Bruenig, for luncheon, and there had
+come up for them under the charm of the place the question of a longer
+stay.
+
+Mrs. Stringham was now on the ground of thrilled recognitions, small
+sharp echoes of a past which she kept in a well-thumbed case, but
+which, on pressure of a spring and exposure to the air, still showed
+itself ticking as hard as an honest old watch. The embalmed "Europe" of
+her younger time had partly stood for three years of Switzerland, a
+term of continuous school at Vevey, with rewards of merit in the form
+of silver medals tied by blue ribbons and mild mountain-passes attacked
+with alpenstocks. It was the good girls who, in the holidays, were
+taken highest, and our friend could now judge, from what she supposed
+her familiarity with the minor peaks, that she had been one of the
+best. These reminiscences, sacred to-day because prepared in the hushed
+chambers of the past, had been part of the general train laid for the
+pair of sisters, daughters early fatherless, by their brave Vermont
+mother, who struck her at present as having apparently, almost like
+Columbus, worked out, all unassisted, a conception of the other side of
+the globe. She had focussed Vevey, by the light of nature, and with
+extraordinary completeness, at Burlington; after which she had
+embarked, sailed, landed, explored and, above all, made good her
+presence. She had given her daughters the five years in Switzerland and
+Germany that were to leave them ever afterwards a standard of
+comparison for all cycles of Cathay, and to stamp the younger in
+especial--Susan was the younger--with a character that, as Mrs.
+Stringham had often had occasion, through life, to say to herself, made
+all the difference. It made all the difference for Mrs. Stringham, over
+and over again and in the most remote connections, that, thanks to her
+parent's lonely, thrifty, hardy faith, she was a woman of the world.
+There were plenty of women who were all sorts of things that she
+wasn't, but who, on the other hand, were not that, and who didn't know
+_she_ was (which she liked--it relegated them still further) and didn't
+know, either, how it enabled her to judge them. She had never seen
+herself so much in this light as during the actual phase of her
+associated, if slightly undirected, pilgrimage; and the consciousness
+gave perhaps to her plea for a pause more intensity than she knew. The
+irrecoverable days had come back to her from far off; they were part of
+the sense of the cool upper air and of everything else that hung like
+an indestructible scent to the torn garment of youth--the taste of
+honey and the luxury of milk, the sound of cattle-bells and the rush of
+streams, the fragrance of trodden balms and the dizziness of deep
+gorges.
+
+Milly clearly felt these things too, but they affected her companion at
+moments--that was quite the way Mrs. Stringham would have expressed
+it--as the princess in a conventional tragedy might have affected the
+confidant if a personal emotion had ever been permitted to the latter.
+That a princess could only be a princess was a truth with which,
+essentially, a confidant, however responsive, had to live. Mrs.
+Stringham was a woman of the world, but Milly Theale was a princess,
+the only one she had yet had to deal with, and this in its way, too,
+made all the difference. It was a perfectly definite doom for the
+wearer--it was for every one else a perfectly palpable quality. It
+might have been, possibly, with its involved loneliness and other
+mysteries, the weight under which she fancied her companion's admirable
+head occasionally, and ever so submissively, bowed. Milly had quite
+assented at luncheon to their staying over, and had left her to look at
+rooms, settle questions, arrange about their keeping on their carriage
+and horses; cares that had now moreover fallen to Mrs. Stringham as a
+matter of course and that yet for some reason, on this occasion
+particularly, brought home to her--all agreeably, richly, almost
+grandly--what it was to live with the great. Her young friend had, in a
+sublime degree, a sense closed to the general question of difficulty,
+which she got rid of, furthermore, not in the least as one had seen
+many charming persons do, by merely passing it on to others. She kept
+it completely at a distance: it never entered the circle; the most
+plaintive confidant couldn't have dragged it in; and to tread the path
+of a confidant was accordingly to live exempt. Service was in other
+words so easy to render that the whole thing was like court life
+without the hardships. It came back of course to the question of money,
+and our observant lady had by this time repeatedly reflected that if
+one were talking of the "difference," it was just this, this
+incomparably and nothing else, that when all was said and done most
+made it. A less vulgarly, a less obviously purchasing or parading
+person she couldn't have imagined; but it was, all the same, the truth
+of truths that the girl couldn't get away from her wealth. She might
+leave her conscientious companion as freely alone with it as possible
+and never ask a question, scarce even tolerate a reference; but it was
+in the fine folds of the helplessly expensive little black frock that
+she drew over the grass as she now strolled vaguely off; it was in the
+curious and splendid coils of hair, "done" with no eye whatever to the
+_mode du jour,_ that peeped from under the corresponding indifference
+of her hat, the merely personal tradition that suggested a sort of
+noble inelegance; it lurked between the leaves of the uncut but
+antiquated Tauchnitz volume of which, before going out, she had
+mechanically possessed herself. 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. Stringham, though the
+bright afternoon was yet young, took, with precautions, the same
+direction, went to join her in case of her caring for a walk. But the
+purpose of joining her was in truth less distinct than that of a due
+regard for a possibly preferred detachment: so that, once more, the
+good lady proceeded with a quietness that made her slightly "underhand"
+even in her own eyes. She couldn't help that, however, and she didn't
+care, sure as she was that what she really wanted was not to overstep,
+but to stop in time. It was to be able to stop in time that she went
+softly, but she had on this occasion further to go than ever yet, for
+she followed in vain, and at last with some anxiety, the footpath she
+believed Milly to have taken. It wound up a hillside and into the
+higher Alpine meadows in which, all these last days, they had so often
+wanted, as they passed above or below, to stray; and then it obscured
+itself in a wood, but always going up, up, and with a small cluster of
+brown old high-perched chalets evidently for its goal. Mrs. Stringham
+reached in due course the chalets, and there received from a bewildered
+old woman, a very fearful person to behold, an indication that
+sufficiently guided her. The young lady had been seen not long before
+passing further on, over a crest and to a place where the way would
+drop again, as our unappeased inquirer found it, in fact, a quarter of
+an hour later, markedly and almost alarmingly to do. It led somewhere,
+yet apparently quite into space, for the great side of the mountain
+appeared, from where she pulled up, to fall away altogether, though
+probably but to some issue below and out of sight. Her uncertainty
+moreover was brief, for she next became aware of the presence on a
+fragment of rock, twenty yards off, of the Tauchnitz volume that the
+girl had brought out, and that therefore pointed to her shortly
+previous passage. She had rid herself of the book, which was an
+encumbrance, and meant of course to pick it up on her return; but as
+she hadn't yet picked it up what on earth had become of her? Mrs.
+Stringham, I hasten to add, was within a few moments to see; but it was
+quite an accident that she had not, before they were over, betrayed by
+her deeper agitation the fact of her own nearness.
+
+The whole place, with the descent of the path and as a sequel to a
+sharp turn that was masked by rocks and shrubs, appeared to fall
+precipitously and to become a "view" pure and simple, a view of great
+extent and beauty, but thrown forward and vertiginous. Milly, with the
+promise of it from just above, had gone straight down to it, not
+stopping till it was all before her; and here, on what struck her
+friend as the dizzy edge of it, she was seated at her ease. The path
+somehow took care of itself and its final business, but the girl's seat
+was a slab of rock at the end of a short promontory or excrescence that
+merely pointed off to the right into gulfs of air and that was so
+placed by good fortune, if not by the worst, as to be at last
+completely visible. For Mrs. Stringham stifled a cry on taking in what
+she believed to be the danger of such a perch for a mere maiden; her
+liability to slip, to slide, to leap, to be precipitated by a single
+false movement, by a turn of the head--how could one tell? into
+whatever was beneath. A thousand thoughts, for the minute, roared in
+the poor lady's ears, but without reaching, as happened, Milly's. It
+was a commotion that left our observer intensely still and holding her
+breath. What had first been offered her was the possibility of a latent
+intention--however wild the idea--in such a posture; of some betrayed
+accordance of Milly's caprice with a horrible hidden obsession. But
+since Mrs. Stringham stood as motionless as if a sound, a syllable,
+must have produced the start that would be fatal, so even the lapse of
+a few seconds had a partly reassuring effect. It gave her time to
+receive the impression which, when she some minutes later softly
+retraced her steps, was to be the sharpest she carried away. This was
+the impression that if the girl was deeply and recklessly meditating
+there, she was not meditating a jump; she was on the contrary, as she
+sat, much more in a state of uplifted and unlimited possession that had
+nothing to gain from violence. She was looking down on the kingdoms of
+the earth, and though indeed that of itself might well go to the brain,
+it wouldn't be with a view of renouncing them. Was she choosing among
+them, or did she want them all? This question, before Mrs. Stringham
+had decided what to do, made others vain; in accordance with which she
+saw, or believed she did, that if it might be dangerous to call out, to
+sound in any way a surprise, it would probably be safe enough to
+withdraw as she had come. She watched a while longer, she held her
+breath, and she never knew afterwards what time had elapsed.
+
+Not many minutes probably, yet they had not seemed few, and they had
+given her so much to think of, not only while creeping home, but while
+waiting afterwards at the inn, that she was still busy with them when,
+late in the afternoon, Milly reappeared. She had stopped at the point
+of the path where the Tauchnitz lay, had taken it up and, with the
+pencil attached to her watch-guard, had scrawled a word--_a
+bientot!_--across the cover; then, even under the girl's continued
+delay, had measured time without a return of alarm. For she now saw
+that the great thing she had brought away was precisely a conviction
+that the future was not to exist for her princess in the form of any
+sharp or simple release from the human predicament. It wouldn't be for
+her a question of a flying leap and thereby of a quick escape. It would
+be a question of taking full in the face the whole assault of life, to
+the general muster of which indeed her face might have been directly
+presented as she sat there on her rock. Mrs. Stringham was thus able to
+say to herself, even after another interval of some length, that if her
+young friend still continued absent it wouldn't be because--whatever
+the opportunity--she had cut short the thread. She wouldn't have
+committed suicide; she knew herself unmistakably reserved for some more
+complicated passage; this was the very vision in which she had, with no
+little awe, been discovered. The image that thus remained with the
+elder lady kept the character of revelation. During the breathless
+minutes of her watch she had seen her companion afresh; the latter's
+type, aspect, marks, her history, her state, her beauty, her mystery,
+all unconsciously betrayed themselves to the Alpine air, and all had
+been gathered in again to feed Mrs. Stringham's flame. They are things
+that will more distinctly appear for us, and they are meanwhile briefly
+represented by the enthusiasm that was stronger on our friend's part
+than any doubt. It was a consciousness she was scarce yet used to
+carrying, but she had as beneath her feet a mine of something precious.
+She seemed to herself to stand near the mouth, not yet quite cleared.
+The mine but needed working and would certainly yield a treasure. She
+was not thinking, either, of Milly's gold.
+
+
+VI
+
+The girl said nothing, when they met, about the words scrawled on the
+Tauchnitz, and Mrs. Stringham then noticed that she had not the book
+with her. She had left it lying and probably would never remember it at
+all. Her comrade's decision was therefore quickly made not to speak of
+having followed her; and within five minutes of her return, wonderfully
+enough, the preoccupation denoted by her forgetfulness further declared
+itself. "Should you think me quite abominable if I were to say that
+after all----?"
+
+Mrs. Stringham had already thought, with the first sound of the
+question, everything she was capable of thinking, and had immediately
+made such a sign that Milly's words gave place to visible relief at her
+assent. "You don't care for our stop here--you'd rather go straight on?
+We'll start then with the peep of to-morrow's dawn--or as early as you
+like; it's only rather late now to take the road again." And she smiled
+to show how she meant it for a joke that an instant onward rush was
+what the girl would have wished. "I bullied you into stopping," she
+added; "so it serves me right."
+
+Milly made in general the most of her good friend's jokes; but she
+humoured this one a little absently. "Oh yes, you do bully me." And it
+was thus arranged between them, with no discussion at all, that they
+would resume their journey in the morning. The younger tourist's
+interest in the detail of the matter--in spite of a declaration from
+the elder that she would consent to be dragged anywhere--appeared
+almost immediately afterwards quite to lose itself; she promised,
+however, to think till supper of where, with the world all before them,
+they might go--supper having been ordered for such time as permitted of
+lighted candles. It had been agreed between them that lighted candles
+at wayside inns, in strange countries, amid mountain scenery, gave the
+evening meal a peculiar poetry--such being the mild adventures, the
+refinements of impression, that they, as they would have said, went in
+for. It was now as if, before this repast, Milly had designed to "lie
+down"; but at the end of three minutes more she was not lying down, she
+was saying instead, abruptly, with a transition that was like a jump of
+four thousand miles: "What was it that, in New York, on the ninth, when
+you saw him alone, Dr. Finch said to you?"
+
+It was not till later that Mrs. Stringham fully knew why the question
+had startled her still more than its suddenness explained; though the
+effect of it even at the moment was almost to frighten her into a false
+answer. She had to think, to remember the occasion, the "ninth," in New
+York, the time she had seen Dr. Finch alone, and to recall what he had
+then said to her; and when everything had come back it was quite, at
+first, for a moment, as if he had said something that immensely
+mattered. He hadn't, however, in fact; it was only as if he might
+perhaps after all have been going to. It was on the sixth--within ten
+days of their sailing--that she had hurried from Boston under the
+alarm, a small but a sufficient shock, of hearing that Mildred had
+suddenly been taken ill, had had, from some obscure cause, such an
+upset as threatened to stay their journey. The bearing of the accident
+had happily soon announced itself as slight, and there had been, in the
+event, but a few hours of anxiety; the journey had been pronounced
+again not only possible, but, as representing "change," highly
+advisable; and if the zealous guest had had five minutes by herself
+with the doctor, that was, clearly, no more at his instance than at her
+own. Almost nothing had passed between them but an easy exchange of
+enthusiasms in respect to the remedial properties of "Europe"; and this
+assurance, as the facts came back to her, she was now able to give.
+"Nothing whatever, on my word of honour, that you mayn't know or
+mightn't then have known. I've no secret with him about you. What makes
+you suspect it? I don't quite make out how you know I did see him
+alone."
+
+"No--you never told me," said Milly. "And I don't mean," she went on,
+"during the twenty-four hours while I was bad, when your putting your
+heads together was natural enough. I mean after I was better--the last
+thing before you went home."
+
+Mrs. Stringham continued to wonder. "Who told you I saw him then?"
+
+_"He_ didn't himself--nor did you write me it afterwards. We speak of
+it now for the first time. That's exactly why!" Milly declared--with
+something in her face and voice that, the next moment, betrayed for her
+companion that she had really known nothing, had only conjectured and,
+chancing her charge, made a hit. Yet why had her mind been busy with
+the question? "But if you're not, as you now assure me, in his
+confidence," she smiled, "it's no matter."
+
+"I'm not in his confidence, and he had nothing to confide. But are you
+feeling unwell?"
+
+The elder woman was earnest for the truth, though the possibility she
+named was not at all the one that seemed to fit--witness the long climb
+Milly had just indulged in. The girl showed her constant white face,
+but that her friends had all learned to discount, and it was often
+brightest when superficially not bravest. She continued for a little
+mysteriously to smile. "I don't know--haven't really the least idea.
+But it might be well to find out."
+
+Mrs. Stringham, at this, flared into sympathy. "Are you in trouble--in
+pain?"
+
+"Not the least little bit. But I sometimes wonder----!"
+
+"Yes"--she pressed: "wonder what?"
+
+"Well, if I shall have much of it."
+
+Mrs. Stringham stared. "Much of what? Not of pain?"
+
+"Of everything. Of everything I have."
+
+Anxiously again, tenderly, our friend cast about. "You 'have'
+everything; so that when you say 'much' of it----"
+
+"I only mean," the girl broke in, "shall I have it for long? That is if
+I _have_ got it."
+
+She had at present the effect, a little, of confounding, or at least of
+perplexing her comrade, who was touched, who was always touched, by
+something helpless in her grace and abrupt in her turns, and yet
+actually half made out in her a sort of mocking light. "If you've got
+an ailment?"
+
+"If I've got everything," Milly laughed.
+
+"Ah, _that_--like almost nobody else."
+
+"Then for how long?"
+
+Mrs. Stringham's eyes entreated her; she had gone close to her, half
+enclosed her with urgent arms. "Do you want to see some one?" And then
+as the girl only met it with a slow headshake, though looking perhaps a
+shade more conscious: "We'll go straight to the best near doctor." This
+too, however, produced but a gaze of qualified assent and a silence,
+sweet and vague, that left everything open. Our friend decidedly lost
+herself. "Tell me, for God's sake, if you're in distress."
+
+"I don't think I've really _everything,"_ Milly said as if to
+explain--and as if also to put it pleasantly.
+
+"But what on earth can I do for you?" The girl hesitated, then seemed
+on the point of being able to say; but suddenly changed and expressed
+herself otherwise. "Dear, dear thing--I'm only too happy!"
+
+It brought them closer, but it rather confirmed Mrs. Stringham's doubt.
+"Then what's the matter?"
+
+"That's the matter--that I can scarcely bear it."
+
+"But what is it you think you haven't got?"
+
+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. "Whom will you see?"--for it
+was as if they looked down from their height at a continent of doctors.
+"Where will you first go?"
+
+Milly had for the third time her air of consideration; but she came
+back with it to her plea of some minutes before. "I'll tell you at
+supper--good-bye till then." And she left the room with a lightness
+that testified for her companion to something that again particularly
+pleased her in the renewed promise of motion. The odd passage just
+concluded, Mrs. Stringham mused as she once more sat alone with a
+hooked needle and a ball of silk, the "fine" work with which she was
+always provided--this mystifying mood had simply been precipitated, no
+doubt, by their prolonged halt, with which the girl hadn't really been
+in sympathy. One had only to admit that her complaint was in fact but
+the excess of the joy of life, and everything _did_ then fit. She
+couldn't stop for the joy, but she could go on for it, and with the
+sense of going on she floated again, was restored to her great spaces.
+There was no evasion of any truth--so at least Susan Shepherd hoped--in
+one's sitting there while the twilight deepened and feeling still more
+finely that the position of this young lady was magnificent. The
+evening at that height had naturally turned to cold, and the travellers
+had bespoken a fire with their meal; the great Alpine road asserted its
+brave presence through the small panes of the low, clean windows, with
+incidents at the inn-door, the yellow _diligence,_ the great waggons,
+the hurrying, hooded, private conveyances, reminders, for our fanciful
+friend, of old stories, old pictures, historic flights, escapes,
+pursuits, things that had happened, things indeed that by a sort of
+strange congruity helped her to read the meanings of the greatest
+interest into the relation in which she was now so deeply involved. It
+was natural that this record of the magnificence of her companion's
+position should strike her as, after all, the best meaning she could
+extract; for she herself was seated in the magnificence as in a
+court-carriage--she came back to that, and such a method of
+progression, such a view from crimson cushions, would evidently have a
+great deal more to give. By the time the candles were lighted for
+supper and the short, white curtains were drawn, Milly had reappeared,
+and the little scenic room had then all its romance. That charm
+moreover was far from broken by the words in which she, without further
+loss of time, satisfied her patient mate. "I want to go straight to
+London."
+
+It was unexpected, corresponding with no view positively taken at their
+departure; when England had appeared, on the contrary, rather relegated
+and postponed--seen for the moment, as who should say, at the end of an
+avenue of preparations and introductions. London, in short, might have
+been supposed to be the crown, and to be achieved like a siege by
+gradual approaches. Milly's actual fine stride was therefore the more
+exciting, as any simplification almost always was to Mrs. Stringham;
+who, besides, was afterwards to recall as the very beginning of a drama
+the terms in which, between their smoky candles, the girl had put her
+preference and in which still other things had come up, come while the
+clank of waggon-chains in the sharp air reached their ears, with the
+stamp of hoofs, the rattle of buckets and the foreign questions,
+foreign answers, that were all alike a part of the cheery converse of
+the road. The girl brought it out in truth as she might have brought a
+huge confession, something she admitted herself shy about and that
+would seem to show her as frivolous; it had rolled over her that what
+she wanted of Europe was "people," so far as they were to be had, and
+that if her friend really wished to know, the vision of this same
+equivocal quantity was what had haunted her during their previous days,
+in museums and churches, and what was again spoiling for her the pure
+taste of scenery. She was all for scenery--yes; but she wanted it human
+and personal, and all she could say was that there would be in
+London--wouldn't there? more of that kind than anywhere else. She came
+back to her idea that if it wasn't for long--if nothing should happen
+to be so for _her_--why, the particular thing she spoke of would
+probably have most to give her in the time, would probably be less than
+anything else a waste of her remainder. She produced this last
+consideration indeed with such gaiety that Mrs. Stringham was not again
+disconcerted by it, was in fact quite ready--if talk of early dying was
+in order--to match it from her own future. Good, then; they would, eat
+and drink because of what might happen to-morrow; and they would direct
+their course from that moment with a view to such eating and drinking.
+They ate and drank that night, in truth, as if in the spirit of this
+decision; whereby the air, before they separated, felt itself the
+clearer.
+
+It had cleared perhaps to a view only too extensive--extensive, that
+is, in proportion to the signs of life presented. The idea of "people"
+was not so entertained on Milly's part as to connect itself with
+particular persons, and the fact remained for each of the ladies that
+they would, completely unknown, disembark at Dover amid the completely
+unknowing. They had no relation already formed; this plea Mrs.
+Stringham put forward to see what it would produce. It produced nothing
+at first but the observation on the girl's side that what she had in
+mind was no thought of society nor of scraping acquaintance; nothing
+was further from her than to desire the opportunities represented for
+the compatriot in general by a trunkful of "letters." It wasn't a
+question, in short, of the people the compatriot was after; it was the
+human, the English picture itself, as they might see it in their own
+way--the world imagined always in what one had read and dreamed. Mrs.
+Stringham did every justice to this world, but when later on an
+occasion chanced to present itself, she made a point of not omitting to
+remark that it might be a comfort to know in advance even an
+individual. This still, however, failed in vulgar parlance, to "fetch"
+Milly, so that she had presently to go all the way. "Haven't I
+understood from you, for that matter, that you gave Mr. Densher
+something of a promise?"
+
+There was a moment, on this, when Milly's look had to be taken as
+representing one of two things--either that she was completely vague
+about the promise or that Mr. Densher's name itself started no train.
+But she really couldn't be so vague about the promise, her
+interlocutress quickly saw, without attaching it to something; it had
+to be a promise to somebody in particular to be so repudiated. In the
+event, accordingly, she acknowledged Mr. Merton Densher, the so
+unusually clever young Englishman who had made his appearance in New
+York on some special literary business--wasn't it?--shortly before
+their departure, and who had been three or four times in her house
+during the brief period between her visit to Boston and her companion's
+subsequent stay with her; but she required much reminding before it
+came back to her that she had mentioned to this companion just
+afterwards the confidence expressed by the personage in question in her
+never doing so dire a thing as to come to London without, as the phrase
+was, looking a fellow up. She had left him the enjoyment of his
+confidence, the form of which might have appeared a trifle free--that
+she now reasserted; she had done nothing either to impair or to enhance
+it; but she had also left Mrs. Stringham, in the connection and at the
+time, rather sorry to have missed Mr. Densher. She had thought of him
+again after that, the elder woman; she had likewise gone so far as to
+notice that Milly appeared not to have done so--which the girl might
+easily have betrayed; and, interested as she was in everything that
+concerned her, she had made out for herself, for herself only and
+rather idly, that, but for interruptions, the young Englishman might
+have become a better acquaintance. His being an acquaintance at all was
+one of the signs that in the first days had helped to place Milly, as a
+young person with the world before her, for sympathy and wonder.
+Isolated, unmothered, unguarded, but with her other strong marks, her
+big house, her big fortune, her big freedom, she had lately begun to
+"receive," for all her few years, as an older woman might have done--as
+was done, precisely, by princesses who had public considerations to
+observe and who came of age very early. If it was thus distinct to Mrs.
+Stringham then that Mr. Densher had gone off somewhere else in
+connection with his errand before her visit to New York, it had been
+also not undiscoverable that he had come back for a day or two later
+on, that is after her own second excursion--that he had in fine
+reappeared on a single occasion on his way to the West: his way from
+Washington as she believed, though he was out of sight at the time of
+her joining her friend for their departure. It had not occurred to her
+before to exaggerate--it had not occurred to her that she could; but
+she seemed to become aware to-night that there had been just enough in
+this relation to meet, to provoke, the free conception of a little more.
+
+She presently put it that, at any rate, promise or no promise, Milly
+would, at a pinch, be able, in London, to act on his permission to make
+him a sign; to which Milly replied with readiness that her ability,
+though evident, would be none the less quite wasted, inasmuch as the
+gentleman would, to a certainty, be still in America. He had a great
+deal to do there--which he would scarce have begun; and in fact she
+might very well not have thought of London at all if she hadn't been
+sure he wasn't yet near coming back. It was perceptible to her
+companion that the moment our young woman had so far committed herself
+she had a sense of having overstepped; which was not quite patched up
+by her saying the next minute, possibly with a certain failure of
+presence of mind, that the last thing she desired was the air of
+running after him. Mrs. Stringham wondered privately what question
+there could be of any such appearance--the danger of which thus
+suddenly came up; but she said, for the time, nothing of it--she only
+said other things: one of which was, for instance, that if Mr. Densher
+was away he was away, and that this was the end of it; also that of
+course they must be discreet at any price. But what was the measure of
+discretion, and how was one to be sure? So it was that, as they sat
+there, she produced her own case: _she_ had a possible tie with London,
+which she desired as little to disown as she might wish to risk
+presuming on it. She treated her companion, in short, for their
+evening's end, to the story of Maud Manningham, the odd but interesting
+English girl who had formed her special affinity in the old days at the
+Vevey school; whom she had written to, after their separation, with a
+regularity that had at first faltered and then altogether failed, yet
+that had been for the time quite a fine case of crude constancy; so
+that it had in fact flickered up again of itself on the occasion of the
+marriage of each. They had then once more fondly, scrupulously
+written--Mrs. Lowder first; and even another letter or two had
+afterwards passed. This, however, had been the end--though with no
+rupture, only a gentle drop: Maud Manningham had made, she believed, a
+great marriage, while she herself had made a small; on top of which,
+moreover, distance, difference, diminished community and impossible
+reunion had done the rest of the work. It was but after all these years
+that reunion had begun to show as possible--if the other party to it,
+that is, should be still in existence. That was exactly what it now
+struck our friend as interesting to ascertain, as, with one aid and
+another, she believed she might. It was an experiment she would at all
+events now make if Milly didn't object.
+
+Milly in general objected to nothing, and, though she asked a question
+or two, she raised no present plea. Her questions--or at least her own
+answers to them--kindled, on Mrs. Stringham's part, a backward train:
+she hadn't known till tonight how much she remembered, or how fine it
+might be to see what had become of large, high-coloured Maud, florid,
+exotic and alien--which had been just the spell--even to the
+perceptions of youth. There was the danger--she frankly touched
+it--that such a temperament mightn't have matured, with the years, all
+in the sense of fineness; it was the sort of danger that, in renewing
+relations after long breaks, one had always to look in the face. To
+gather in strayed threads was to take a risk--for which, however, she
+was prepared if Milly was. The possible "fun," she confessed, was by
+itself rather tempting; and she fairly sounded, with this--wound up a
+little as she was--the note of fun as the harmless final right of fifty
+years of mere New England virtue. Among the things she was afterwards
+to recall was the indescribable look dropped on her, at this, by her
+companion; she was still seated there between the candles and before
+the finished supper, while Milly moved about, and the look was long to
+figure for her as an inscrutable comment on _her_ notion of freedom.
+Challenged, at any rate, as for the last wise word, Milly showed
+perhaps, musingly, charmingly, that, though her attention had been
+mainly soundless, her friend's story--produced as a resource
+unsuspected, a card from up the sleeve--half surprised, half beguiled
+her. Since the matter, such as it was, depended on that, she brought
+out, before she went to bed, an easy, a light "Risk everything!"
+
+This quality in it seemed possibly a little to deny weight to Maud
+Lowder's evoked presence--as Susan Stringham, still sitting up, became,
+in excited reflection, a trifle more conscious. Something determinant,
+when the girl had left her, took place in her--nameless but, as soon as
+she had given way, coercive. It was as if she knew again, in this
+fulness of time, that she had been, after Maud's marriage, just
+sensibly outlived or, as people nowadays said, shunted. Mrs. Lowder had
+left her behind, and on the occasion, subsequently, of the
+corresponding date in her own life--not the second, the sad one, with
+its dignity of sadness, but the first, with the meagreness of its
+supposed felicity--she had been, in the same spirit, almost
+patronisingly pitied. If that suspicion, even when it had ceased to
+matter, had never quite died out for her, there was doubtless some
+oddity in its now offering itself as a link, rather than as another
+break, in the chain; and indeed there might well have been for her a
+mood in which the notion of the development of patronage in her quondam
+schoolmate would have settled her question in another sense. It was
+actually settled--if the case be worth our analysis--by the happy
+consummation, the poetic justice, the generous revenge, of her having
+at last something to show. Maud, on their parting company, had appeared
+to have so much, and would now--for wasn't it also, in general, quite
+the rich law of English life?--have, with accretions, promotions,
+expansions, ever so much more. Very good; such things might be; she
+rose to the sense of being ready for them. Whatever Mrs. Lowder might
+have to show--and one hoped one did the presumptions all justice--she
+would have nothing like Milly Theale, who constituted the trophy
+producible by poor Susan. Poor Susan lingered late--till the candles
+were low, and as soon as the table was cleared she opened her neat
+portfolio. She had not lost the old clue; there were connections she
+remembered, addresses she could try; so the thing was to begin. She
+wrote on the spot.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FOURTH
+
+VII
+
+It had all gone so fast after this that Milly uttered but the truth
+nearest to hand in saying to the gentleman on her right--who was, by
+the same token, the gentleman on her hostess's left--that she scarce
+even then knew where she was: the words marking her first full sense of
+a situation really romantic. They were already dining, she and her
+friend, at Lancaster Gate, and surrounded, as it seemed to her, with
+every English accessory; though her consciousness of Mrs. Lowder's
+existence, and still more of her remarkable identity, had been of so
+recent and so sudden a birth. Susie, as she was apt to call her
+companion for a lighter change, had only had to wave a neat little wand
+for the fairy-tale to begin at once; in consequence of which Susie now
+glittered--for, with Mrs. Stringham's new sense of success, it came to
+that--in the character of a fairy godmother. Milly had almost insisted
+on dressing her, for the present occasion, as one; and it was no fault
+of the girl's if the good lady had not now appeared in a peaked hat, a
+short petticoat and diamond shoe-buckles, brandishing the magic crutch.
+The good lady, in truth, bore herself not less contentedly than if
+these insignia had marked her work; and Milly's observation to Lord
+Mark had just been, doubtless, the result of such a light exchange of
+looks with her as even the great length of the table had not baffled.
+There were twenty persons between them, but this sustained passage was
+the sharpest sequel yet to that other comparison of views during the
+pause on the Swiss pass. It almost appeared to Milly that their fortune
+had been unduly precipitated--as if, properly, they were in the
+position of having ventured on a small joke and found the answer out of
+proportion grave. She could not at this moment, for instance, have said
+whether, with her quickened perceptions, she were more enlivened or
+oppressed; and the case might in fact have been serious had she not, by
+good fortune, from the moment the picture loomed, quickly made up her
+mind that what finally most concerned her was neither to seek nor to
+shirk, was not even to wonder too much, but was to let things come as
+they would, since there was little enough doubt of how they would go.
+
+Lord Mark had been brought to her before dinner--not by Mrs. Lowder,
+but by the handsome girl, that lady's niece, who was now at the other
+end and on the same side as Susie; he had taken her in, and she meant
+presently to ask him about Miss Croy, the handsome girl, actually
+offered to her sight--though now in a splendid way--but for the second
+time. The first time had been the occasion--only three days before--of
+her calling at their hotel with her aunt and then making, for our other
+two heroines, a great impression of beauty and eminence. This
+impression had remained so with Milly that, at present, and although
+her attention was aware at the same time of everything else, her eyes
+were mainly engaged with Kate Croy when not engaged with Susie. That
+wonderful creature's eyes moreover readily met them--she ranked now as
+a wonderful creature; and it seemed a part of the swift prosperity of
+the American visitors that, so little in the original reckoning, she
+should yet appear conscious, charmingly, frankly conscious, of
+possibilities of friendship for them. Milly had easily and, as a guest,
+gracefully generalised: English girls had a special, strong beauty, and
+it particularly showed in evening dress--above all when, as was
+strikingly the case with this one, the dress itself was what it should
+be. That observation she had all ready for Lord Mark when they should,
+after a little, get round to it. She seemed even now to see that there
+might be a good deal they would get round to; the indication being
+that, taken up once for all with her other neighbour, their hostess
+would leave them much to themselves. Mrs. Lowder's other neighbour was
+the Bishop of Murrum--a real bishop, such as Milly had never seen, with
+a complicated costume, a voice like an old-fashioned wind instrument,
+and a face all the portrait of a prelate; while the gentleman on our
+young lady's left, a gentleman thick-necked, large and literal, who
+looked straight before him and as if he were not to be diverted by vain
+words from that pursuit, clearly counted as an offset to the possession
+of Lord Mark. As Milly made out these things--with a shade of
+exhilaration at the way she already fell in--she saw how she was
+justified of her plea for people and her love of life. It wasn't then,
+as the prospect seemed to show, so difficult to get into the current,
+or to stand, at any rate, on the bank. It was easy to get near--if they
+_were_ near; and yet the elements were different enough from any of her
+old elements, and positively rich and strange.
+
+She asked herself if her right-hand neighbour would understand what she
+meant by such a description of them, should she throw it off; but
+another of the things to which, precisely, her sense was awakened was
+that no, decidedly, he wouldn't. It was nevertheless by this time open
+to her that his line would be to be clever; and indeed, evidently, no
+little of the interest was going to be in the fresh reference and fresh
+effect both of people's cleverness and of their simplicity. She
+thrilled, she consciously flushed, and turned pale with the
+certitude--it had never been so present--that she should find herself
+completely involved: the very air of the place, the pitch of the
+occasion, had for her so positive a taste and so deep an undertone. The
+smallest things, the faces, the hands, the jewels of the women, the
+sound of words, especially of names, across the table, the shape of the
+forks, the arrangement of the flowers, the attitude of the servants,
+the walls of the room, were all touches in a picture and denotements in
+a play; and they marked for her, moreover, her alertness of vision. She
+had never, she might well believe, been in such a state of vibration;
+her sensibility was almost too sharp for her comfort: there were, for
+example, more indications than she could reduce to order in the manner
+of the friendly niece, who struck her as distinguished and interesting,
+as in fact surprisingly genial. This young woman's type had, visibly,
+other possibilities; yet here, of its own free movement, it had already
+sketched a relation. Were they, Miss Croy and she, to take up the tale
+where their two elders had left it off so many years before?--were they
+to find they liked each other and to try for themselves if a scheme of
+constancy on more modern lines could be worked? She had doubted, as
+they came to England, of Maud Manningham, had believed her a broken
+reed and a vague resource, had seen their dependence on her as a state
+of mind that would have been shamefully silly--so far as it _was_
+dependence--had they wished to do any thing so inane as "get into
+society." To have made their pilgrimage all for the sake of such
+society as Mrs. Lowder might have in reserve for them--that didn't bear
+thinking of at all, and she herself had quite chosen her course for
+curiosity about other matters. She would have described this curiosity
+as a desire to see the places she had read about, and _that_
+description of her motive she was prepared to give her neighbour--even
+though, as a consequence of it, he should find how little she had read.
+It was almost at present as if her poor prevision had been rebuked by
+the majesty--she could scarcely call it less--of the event, or at all
+events by the commanding character of the two figures--she could
+scarcely call _that_ less either--mainly presented. Mrs. Lowder and her
+niece, however dissimilar, had at least in common that each was a great
+reality. That was true, primarily, of the aunt--so true that Milly
+wondered how her own companion had arrived, in other days, at so odd an
+alliance; yet she none the less felt Mrs. Lowder as a person of whom
+the mind might in two or three days roughly make the circuit. She would
+sit there massive, at least, while one attempted it; whereas Miss Croy,
+the handsome girl, would indulge in incalculable movements that might
+interfere with one's tour. She was real, none the less, and everything
+and everybody were real; and it served them right, no doubt, the pair
+of them, for having rushed into their adventure.
+
+Lord Mark's intelligence meanwhile, however, had met her own quite
+sufficiently to enable him to tell her how little he could clear up her
+situation. He explained, for that matter--or at least he hinted--that
+there was no such thing, to-day in London, as saying where any one was.
+Every one was everywhere--nobody was anywhere. He should be put to
+it--yes, frankly--to give a name of any sort or kind to their hostess's
+"set." _Was_ it a set at all, or wasn't it, and were there not really
+no such things as sets, in the place, any more?--was there any thing
+but the senseless shifting tumble, like that of some great greasy sea
+in mid-Channel, of an overwhelming melted mixture? He threw out the
+question, which seemed large; Milly felt that at the end of five
+minutes he had thrown out a great many, though he followed none more
+than a step or two; perhaps he would prove suggestive, but he helped
+her as yet to no discriminations: he spoke as if he had given them up
+from too much knowledge. He was thus at the opposite extreme from
+herself, but, as a consequence of it, also wandering and lost; and he
+was furthermore, for all his temporary incoherence, to which she
+guessed there would be some key, as great a reality as either Mrs.
+Lowder or Kate. The only light in which he placed the former of these
+ladies was that of an extraordinary woman--a most extraordinary woman,
+and "the more extraordinary the more one knows her," while of the
+latter he said nothing, for the moment, but that she was tremendously,
+yes, quite tremendously, good-looking. It was some time, she thought,
+before his talk showed his cleverness, and yet each minute she believed
+in it more, quite apart from what her hostess had told her on first
+naming him. Perhaps he was one of the cases she had heard of at
+home--those characteristic cases of people in England who concealed
+their play of mind so much more than they showed it. Even Mr. Densher a
+little did that. And what made Lord Mark, at any rate, so real either,
+when this was a thing he so definitely insisted on? His type some how,
+as by a life, a need, an intention of its own, insisted _for_ him; but
+that was all. It was difficult to guess his age--whether he were a
+young man who looked old or an old man who looked young; it seemed to
+prove nothing, as against other things, that he was bald and, as might
+have been said, slightly stale, or, more delicately perhaps, dry: there
+was such a fine little fidget of preoccupied life in him, and his eyes,
+at moments--though it was an appearance they could suddenly lose--were
+as candid and clear as those of a pleasant boy. Very neat, very light,
+and so fair that there was little other indication of his moustache
+than his constantly feeling it--which was again boyish--he would have
+affected her as the most intellectual person present if he had not
+affected her as the most frivolous. The latter quality was rather in
+his look than in anything else, though he constantly wore his double
+eyeglass, which was, much more, Bostonian and thoughtful.
+
+The idea of his frivolity had, no doubt, to do with his personal
+designation, which represented--as yet, for our young woman, a little
+confusedly--a connection with an historic patriciate, a class that, in
+turn, also confusedly, represented an affinity with a social element
+that she had never heard otherwise described than as "fashion." The
+supreme social element in New York had never known itself but as
+reduced to that category, and though Milly was aware that, as applied
+to a territorial and political aristocracy, the label was probably too
+simple, she had for the time none other at hand. She presently, it is
+true, enriched her idea with the perception that her interlocutor was
+indifferent; yet this, indifferent as aristocracies notoriously were,
+saw her but little further, inasmuch as she felt that, in the first
+place, he would much rather get on with her than not, and in the second
+was only thinking of too many matters of his own. If he kept her in
+view on the one hand and kept so much else on the other--the way he
+crumbed up his bread was a proof--why did he hover before her as a
+potentially insolent noble? She couldn't have answered the question,
+and it was precisely one of those that swarmed. They were complicated,
+she might fairly have said, by his visibly knowing, having known from
+afar off, that she was a stranger and an American, and by his none the
+less making no more of it than if she and her like were the chief of
+his diet. He took her, kindly enough, but imperturbably, irreclaimably,
+for granted, and it wouldn't in the least help that she herself knew
+him, as quickly, for having been in her country and threshed it out.
+There would be nothing for her to explain or attenuate or brag about;
+she could neither escape nor prevail by her strangeness; he would have,
+for that matter, on such a subject, more to tell her than to learn from
+her. She might learn from _him_ why she was so different from the
+handsome girl--which she didn't know, being merely able to feel it; or
+at any rate might learn from him why the handsome girl was so different
+from her.
+
+On these lines, however, they would move later; the lines immediately
+laid down were, in spite of his vagueness for his own convenience,
+definite enough. She was already, he observed to her, thinking what she
+should say on her other side--which was what Americans were always
+doing. She needn't in conscience say anything at all; but Americans
+never knew that, nor ever, poor creatures, yes (_she_ had interposed
+the "poor creatures!") what not to do. The burdens they took on--the
+things, positively, they made an affair of! This easy and, after all,
+friendly jibe at her race was really for her, on her new friend's part,
+the note of personal recognition so far as she required it; and she
+gave him a prompt and conscious example of morbid anxiety by insisting
+that her desire to be, herself, "lovely" all round was justly founded
+on the lovely way Mrs. Lowder had met her. He was directly interested
+in that, and it was not till afterwards that she fully knew how much
+more information about their friend he had taken than given. Here
+again, for instance, was a pertinent note for her: she had, on the
+spot, with her first plunge into the obscure depths of a society
+constituted from far back, encountered the interesting phenomenon of
+complicated, of possibly sinister motive. However, Maud Manningham (her
+name, even in her presence, somehow still fed the fancy) _had,_ all the
+same, been lovely, and one was going to meet her now quite as far on as
+one had one's self been met. She had been with them at their
+hotel--they were a pair--before even they had supposed she could have
+got their letter. Of course indeed they had written in advance, but
+they had followed that up very fast. She had thus engaged them to dine
+but two days later, and on the morrow again, without waiting for a
+return visit, waiting for anything, she had called with her niece. It
+was as if she really cared for them, and it was magnificent
+fidelity--fidelity to Mrs. Stringham, her own companion and Mrs.
+Lowder's former schoolmate, the lady with the charming face and the
+rather high dress down there at the end.
+
+Lord Mark took in through his nippers these balanced attributes of
+Susie. "But isn't Mrs. Stringham's fidelity then equally magnificent?"
+
+"Well, it's a beautiful sentiment; but it isn't as if she had anything
+to _give."_
+
+"Hasn't she got you?" Lord Mark presently asked.
+
+"Me--to give Mrs. Lowder?" Milly had clearly not yet seen herself in
+the light of such an offering. "Oh, I'm rather a poor present; and I
+don't feel as if, even at that, I've as yet quite been given."
+
+"You've been shown, and if our friend has jumped at you it comes to the
+same thing." He made his jokes, Lord Mark, without amusement for
+himself; yet it wasn't that he was grim. "To be seen you must
+recognise, _is,_ for you, to be jumped at; and, if it's a question of
+being shown, here you are again. Only it has now been taken out of your
+friend's hands; it's Mrs. Lowder, already, who's getting the benefit.
+Look round the table and you'll make out, I think, that you're being,
+from top to bottom, jumped at."
+
+"Well, then," said Milly, "I seem also to feel that I like it better
+than being made fun of."
+
+It was one of the things she afterwards saw--Milly was for ever seeing
+things afterwards--that her companion had here had some way of his own,
+quite unlike any one's else, of assuring her of his consideration. She
+wondered how he had done it, for he had neither apologised nor
+protested. She said to herself, at any rate, that he had led her on;
+and what was most odd was the question by which he had done so. "Does
+she know much about you?"
+
+"No, she just likes us."
+
+Even for this his travelled lordship, seasoned and saturated, had no
+laugh. "I mean _you_ particularly. Has that lady with the charming
+face, which _is_ charming, told her?"
+
+Milly hesitated. "Told her what?"
+
+"Everything."
+
+This, with the way he dropped it, again considerably moved her--made
+her feel for a moment that, as a matter of course, she was a subject
+for disclosures. But she quickly found her answer. "Oh, as for that,
+you must ask _her."_
+
+"Your clever companion?"
+
+"Mrs. Lowder."
+
+He replied to this that their hostess was a person with whom there were
+certain liberties one never took, but that he was none the less fairly
+upheld, inasmuch as she was for the most part kind to him and as,
+should he be very good for a while, she would probably herself tell
+him. "And I shall have, at any rate, in the meantime, the interest of
+seeing what she does with you. That will teach me more or less, you
+see, how much she knows."
+
+Milly followed this--it was lucid; but it suggested something apart.
+"How much does she know about _you?"_
+
+"Nothing," said Lord Mark serenely. "But that doesn't matter--for what
+she does with me." And then, as to anticipate Milly's question about
+the nature of such doing: "This, for instance--turning me straight on
+for _you."_
+
+The girl thought. "And you mean she wouldn't if she did know----?"
+
+He met it as if it were really a point. "No. I believe, to do her
+justice, she still would. So you can be easy."
+
+Milly had the next instant, then, acted on the permission. "Because
+you're even at the worst the best thing she has?"
+
+With this he was at last amused. "I was till you came. You're the best
+now."
+
+It was strange his words should have given her the sense of his
+knowing, but it was positive that they did so, and to the extent of
+making her believe them, though still with wonder. That, really, from
+this first of their meetings, was what was most to abide with her: she
+accepted almost helplessly, she surrendered to the inevitability of
+being the sort of thing, as he might have said, that he at least
+thoroughly believed he had, in going about, seen here enough of for all
+practical purposes. Her submission was naturally, moreover, not to be
+impaired by her learning later on that he had paid at short intervals,
+though at a time apparently just previous to her own emergence from the
+obscurity of extreme youth, three separate visits to New York, where
+his nameable friends and his contrasted contacts had been numerous. His
+impression, his recollection of the whole mixed quantity, was still
+visibly rich. It had helped him to place her, and she was more and more
+sharply conscious of having--as with the door sharply slammed upon her
+and the guard's hand raised in signal to the train--been popped into
+the compartment in which she was to travel for him. It was a use of her
+that many a girl would have been doubtless quick to resent; and the
+kind of mind that thus, in our young lady, made all for mere seeing and
+taking is precisely one of the charms of our subject. Milly had
+practically just learned from him, had made out, as it were, from her
+rumbling compartment, that he gave her the highest place among their
+friend's actual properties. She was a success, that was what it came
+to, he presently assured her, and that was what it was to be a success:
+it always happened before one could know it. One's ignorance was in
+fact often the greatest part of it. "You haven't had time yet," he
+said; "this is nothing. But you'll see. You'll see everything. You can,
+you know--everything you dream of."
+
+He made her more and more wonder; she almost felt as if he were showing
+her visions while he spoke; and strangely enough, though it was visions
+that had drawn her on, she hadn't seen them in connection--that is in
+such preliminary and necessary connection--with such a face as Lord
+Mark's, such eyes and such a voice, such a tone and such a manner. He
+had for an instant the effect of making her ask herself if she were
+after all going to be afraid; so distinct was it for fifty seconds that
+a fear passed over her. There they were again--yes, certainly: Susie's
+overture to Mrs. Lowder had been their joke, but they had pressed in
+that gaiety an electric bell that continued to sound. Positively, while
+she sat there, she had the loud rattle in her ears, and she wondered,
+during these moments, why the others didn't hear it. They didn't stare,
+they didn't smile, and the fear in her that I speak of was but her own
+desire to stop it. That dropped, however, as if the alarm itself had
+ceased; she seemed to have seen in a quick, though tempered glare that
+there were two courses for her, one to leave London again the first
+thing in the morning, the other to do nothing at all. Well, she would
+do nothing at all; she was already doing it; more than that, she had
+already done it, and her chance was gone. She gave herself up--she had
+the strangest sense, on the spot, of so deciding; for she had turned a
+corner before she went on again with Lord Mark. Inexpressive, but
+intensely significant, he met as no one else could have done the very
+question she had suddenly put to Mrs. Stringham on the Bruenig. Should
+she have it, whatever she did have, that question had been, for long?
+"Ah, so possibly not," her neighbour appeared to reply; "therefore,
+don't you see? _I'm_ the way." It was vivid that he might be, in spite
+of his absence of flourish; the way being doubtless just _in_ that
+absence. The handsome girl, whom she didn't lose sight of and who, she
+felt, kept her also in view--Mrs. Lowder's striking niece would,
+perhaps, be the way as well, for in her too was the absence of
+flourish, though she had little else, so far as one could tell, in
+common with Lord Mark. Yet how indeed _could_ one tell, what did one
+understand, and of what was one, for that matter, provisionally
+conscious but of their being somehow together in what they represented?
+Kate Croy, fine but friendly, looked over at her as really with a guess
+at Lord Mark's effect on her. If she could guess this effect what then
+did she know about it and in what degree had she felt it herself? Did
+that represent, as between them, anything particular, and should she
+have to count with them as duplicating, as intensifying by a mutual
+intelligence, the relation into which she was sinking? Nothing was so
+odd as that she should have to recognise so quickly in each of these
+glimpses of an instant the various signs of a relation; and this
+anomaly itself, had she had more time to give to it, might well, might
+almost terribly have suggested to her that her doom was to live fast.
+It was queerly a question of the short run and the consciousness
+proportionately crowded.
+
+These were immense excursions for the spirit of a young person at Mrs.
+Lowder's mere dinner-party; but what was so significant and so
+admonitory as the fact of their being possible? What could they have
+been but just a part, already, of the crowded consciousness? And it was
+just a part, likewise, that while plates were changed and dishes
+presented and periods in the banquet marked; while appearances insisted
+and phenomena multiplied and words reached her from here and there like
+plashes of a slow, thick tide; while Mrs. Lowder grew somehow more
+stout and more instituted and Susie, at her distance and in comparison,
+more thinly improvised and more different--different, that is, from
+every one and everything: it was just a part that while this process
+went forward our young lady alighted, came back, taking up her destiny
+again as if she had been able by a wave or two of her wings to place
+herself briefly in sight of an alternative to it. Whatever it was it
+had showed in this brief interval as better than the alternative; and
+it now presented itself altogether in the image and in the place in
+which she had left it. The image was that of her being, as Lord Mark
+had declared, a success. This depended more or less of course on his
+idea of the thing--into which at present, however, she wouldn't go.
+But, renewing soon, she had asked him what he meant then that Mrs.
+Lowder would do with her, and he had replied that this might safely be
+left. "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."
+
+Lord Mark seemed, within the limits of his enthusiasm, to find this
+charming. "Ah, she strikes you as an idealist?"
+
+"She idealises _us,_ my friend and me, absolutely. She sees us in a
+light," said Milly. "That's all I've got to hold on by. So don't
+deprive me of it."
+
+"I wouldn't for the world. But do you think," he continued as if it
+were suddenly important for him--"do you think she sees _me_ in a
+light?"
+
+She neglected his question for a little, partly because her attention
+attached itself more and more to the handsome girl, partly because,
+placed so near their hostess, she wished not to show as discussing her
+too freely. Mrs. Lowder, it was true, steering in the other quarter a
+course in which she called at subjects as if they were islets in an
+archipelago, continued to allow them their ease, and Kate Croy, at the
+same time, steadily revealed herself as interesting. Milly in fact
+found, of a sudden, her ease--found it all--as she bethought herself
+that what Mrs. Lowder was really arranging for was a report on her
+quality and, as perhaps might be said, her value from Lord Mark. She
+wished him, the wonderful lady, to have no pretext for not knowing what
+he thought of Miss Theale. Why his judgment so mattered remained to be
+seen; but it was this divination, in any case, that now determined
+Milly's rejoinder. "No. She knows you. She has probably reason to. And
+you all, here, know each other--I see that--so far as you know
+anything. You know what you're used to, and it's your being used to
+it--that, and that only--that makes you. But there are things you don't
+know."
+
+He took it in as if it might fairly, to do him justice, be a point.
+"Things that _I_ don't--with all the pains I take and the way I've run
+about the world to leave nothing unlearned?"
+
+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 _blase,_ 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. Lowder, however, only smiled on Milly for a sign that something
+racy was what she had expected, and resumed, with a splash of her
+screw, her cruise among the islands. "Oh, I've heard that," the young
+man replied, "before!"
+
+"There it is then. You've heard everything before. You've heard _me_ of
+course before, in my country, often enough."
+
+"Oh, never too often," he protested; "I'm sure I hope I shall still
+hear you again and again."
+
+"But what good then has it done you?" the girl went on as if now
+frankly to amuse him.
+
+"Oh, you'll see when you know me."
+
+"But, most assuredly, I shall never know you."
+
+"Then that will be exactly," he laughed, "the good!"
+
+If it established thus that they couldn't, or Wouldn't, mix, why, none
+the less, did Milly feel, through it, a perverse quickening of the
+relation to which she had been, in spite of herself, appointed?
+
+What queerer consequence of their not mixing than their talking--for it
+was what they had arrived at--almost intimately? She wished to get away
+from him, or indeed, much rather, away from herself so far as she was
+present to him. She saw already--wonderful creature, after all, herself
+too--that there would be a good deal more of him to come for her, and
+that the special sign of their intercourse would be to keep herself out
+of the question. Everything else might come in--only never that; and
+with such an arrangement they might even go far. This in fact might
+quite have begun, on the spot, with her returning again to the topic of
+the handsome girl. If she was to keep herself out she could naturally
+best do so by putting in somebody else. She accordingly put in Kate
+Croy, being ready to that extent--as she was not at all afraid for
+her--to sacrifice her if necessary. Lord Mark himself, for that matter,
+had made it easy by saying a little while before that no one among them
+did anything for nothing. "What then"--she was aware of being
+abrupt--"does Miss Croy, if she's so interested, do it for? What has
+she to gain by _her_ lovely welcome? Look at her _now!"_ Milly broke
+out with characteristic freedom of praise, though pulling herself up
+also with a compunctious "Oh!" as the direction thus given to their
+eyes happened to coincide with a turn of Kate's face to them. All she
+had meant to do was to insist that this face was fine; but what she had
+in fact done was to renew again her effect of showing herself to its
+possessor as conjoined with Lord Mark for some interested view of it.
+He had, however, promptly met her question.
+
+"To gain? Why, your acquaintance."
+
+"Well, what's my acquaintance to her? She can care for me--she must
+feel that--only by being sorry for me; and that's why she's lovely: to
+be already willing to take the trouble to be. It's the height of the
+disinterested."
+
+There were more things in this than one that Lord Mark might have taken
+up; but in a minute he had made his choice. "Ah then, I'm nowhere, for
+I'm afraid _I'm_ not sorry for you in the least. What do you make
+then," he asked, "of your success?"
+
+"Why, just the great reason of all. It's just because our friend there
+sees it that she pities me. She understands," Milly said; "she's better
+than any of you. She's beautiful."
+
+He appeared struck with this at last--with the point the girl made of
+it; to which she came back even after a diversion created by a dish
+presented between them. "Beautiful in character, I see. _Is_ she so?
+You must tell me about her."
+
+Milly wondered. "But haven't you known her longer than I? Haven't you
+seen her for yourself?"
+
+"No--I've failed with her. It's no use. I don't make her out. And I
+assure you I really should like to." His assurance had in fact for his
+companion a positive suggestion of sincerity; he affected her as now
+saying something that he felt; and she was the more struck with it as
+she was still conscious of the failure even of curiosity he had just
+shown in respect to herself. She had meant something--though indeed for
+herself almost only--in speaking of their friend's natural pity; it had
+been a note, doubtless, of questionable taste, but it had quavered out
+in spite of her; and he had not so much as cared to inquire "Why
+'natural'?" Not that it wasn't really much better for her that he
+shouldn't: explanations would in truth have taken her much too far.
+Only she now perceived that, in comparison, her word about this other
+person really "drew" him; and there were things in that, probably, many
+things, as to which she would learn more and which glimmered there
+already as part and parcel of that larger "real" with which, in her new
+situation, she was to be beguiled. It was in fact at the very moment,
+this element, not absent from what Lord Mark was further saying. "So
+you're wrong, you see, as to our knowing all about each other. There
+are cases where we break down. I at any rate give _her_ up--up, that
+is, to you. You must do her for me--tell me, I mean, when you know
+more. You'll notice," he pleasantly wound up, "that I've confidence in
+you."
+
+"Why shouldn't you have?" Milly asked, observing in this, as she
+thought, a fine, though, for such a man, a surprisingly artless,
+fatuity. It was as if there might have been a question of her
+falsifying for the sake of her own show--that is of her honesty not
+being proof against her desire to keep well with him herself. She
+didn't, none the less, otherwise protest against his remark; there was
+something else she was occupied in seeing. It was the handsome girl
+alone, one of his own species and his own society, who had made him
+feel uncertain; of his certainties about a mere little American, a
+cheap exotic, imported almost wholesale, and whose habitat, with its
+conditions of climate, growth, and cultivation, its immense profusion,
+but its few varieties and thin development, he was perfectly satisfied.
+The marvel was, too, that Milly understood his satisfaction--feeling
+that she expressed the truth in presently saying: "Of course; I make
+out that she must be difficult; just as I see that I myself must be
+easy." And that was what, for all the rest of this occasion, remained
+with her--as the most interesting thing that could remain. She was more
+and more content herself to be easy; she would have been resigned, even
+had it been brought straighter home to her, to passing for a cheap
+exotic. Provisionally, at any rate, that protected her wish to keep
+herself, with Lord Mark, in abeyance. They _had_ all affected her as
+inevitably knowing each other, and if the handsome girl's place among
+them was something even their initiation couldn't deal with--why, then,
+she would indeed be a quantity.
+
+
+VIII
+
+That sense of quantities, separate or mixed, was indeed doubtless what
+most prevailed at first for our slightly gasping American pair; it
+found utterance for them in their frequent remark to each other that
+they had no one but themselves to thank. It dropped from Milly more
+than once that if she had ever known it was so easy--! though her
+exclamation mostly ended without completing her idea. This, however,
+was a trifle to Mrs. Stringham, who cared little whether she meant that
+in this case she would have come sooner. She couldn't have come sooner,
+and she perhaps, on the contrary, meant--for it would have been like
+her--that she wouldn't have come at all; why it was so easy being at
+any rate a matter as to which her companion had begun quickly to pick
+up views. Susie kept some of these lights for the present to herself,
+since, freely communicated, they might have been a little disturbing;
+with which, moreover, the quantities that we speak of as surrounding
+the two ladies were, in many cases, quantities of things--and of other
+things--to talk about. Their immediate lesson, accordingly, was that
+they just had been caught up by the incalculable strength of a wave
+that was actually holding them aloft and that would naturally dash them
+wherever it liked. They meanwhile, we hasten to add, make the best of
+their precarious position, and if Milly had had no other help for it
+she would have found not a little in the sight of Susan Shepherd's
+state. The girl had had nothing to say to her, for three days, about
+the "success" announced by Lord Mark--which they saw, besides,
+otherwise established; she was too taken up, too touched, by Susie's
+own exaltation. Susie glowed in the light of her justified faith;
+everything had happened that she had been acute enough to think least
+probable; she had appealed to a possible delicacy in Maud Manningham--a
+delicacy, mind you, but _barely_ possible--and her appeal had been met
+in a way that was an honour to human nature. This proved sensibility of
+the lady of Lancaster Gate performed verily, for both our friends,
+during these first days, the office of a fine floating gold-dust,
+something that threw over the prospect a harmonising blur. The forms,
+the colours behind it were strong and deep--we have seen how they
+already stood out for Milly; but nothing, comparatively, had had so
+much of the dignity of truth as the fact of Maud's fidelity to a
+sentiment. That was what Susie was proud of, much more than of her
+great place in the world, which she was moreover conscious of not as
+yet wholly measuring. That was what was more vivid even than her
+being--in senses more worldly and in fact almost in the degree of a
+revelation--English and distinct and positive, with almost no inward,
+but with the finest outward resonance.
+
+Susan Shepherd's word for her, again and again, was that she was
+"large"; yet it was not exactly a case, as to the soul, of echoing
+chambers: she might have been likened rather to a capacious receptacle,
+originally perhaps loose, but now drawn as tightly as possible over its
+accumulated contents--a packed mass, for her American admirer, of
+curious detail. When the latter good lady, at home, had handsomely
+figured her friends as not small--which was the way she mostly figured
+them--there was a certain implication that they were spacious because
+they were empty. Mrs. Lowder, by a different law, was spacious because
+she was full, because she had something in common, even in repose, with
+a projectile, of great size, loaded and ready for use. That indeed, to
+Susie's romantic mind, announced itself as half the charm of their
+renewal--a charm as of sitting in springtime, during a long peace, on
+the daisied, grassy bank of some great slumbering fortress. True to her
+psychological instincts, certainly, Mrs. Stringham had noted that the
+"sentiment" she rejoiced in on her old schoolmate's part was all a
+matter of action and movement, was not, save for the interweaving of a
+more frequent plump "dearest" than she would herself perhaps have used,
+a matter of much other embroidery. She brooded, with interest, on this
+further remark of race, feeling in her own spirit a different economy.
+The joy, for her, was to know _why_ she acted--the reason was half the
+business; whereas with Mrs. Lowder there might have been no reason:
+"why" was the trivial seasoning-substance, the vanilla or the nutmeg,
+omittable from the nutritive pudding without spoiling it. Mrs. Lowder's
+desire was clearly sharp that their young companions should also
+prosper together; and Mrs. Stringham's account of it all to Milly,
+during the first days, was that when, at Lancaster Gate, she was not
+occupied in telling, as it were, about her, she was occupied in hearing
+much of the history of her hostess's brilliant niece.
+
+They had plenty, on these lines, the two elder women, to give and to
+take, and it was even not quite clear to the pilgrim from Boston that
+what she should mainly have arranged for in London was not a series of
+thrills for herself. She had a bad conscience, indeed almost a sense of
+immorality, in having to recognise that she was, as she said, carried
+away. She laughed to Milly when she also said that she didn't know
+where it would end; and the principal of her uneasiness was that Mrs.
+Lowder's life bristled for her with elements that she was really having
+to look at for the first time. They represented, she believed, the
+world, the world that, as a consequence of the cold shoulder turned to
+it by the Pilgrim Fathers, had never yet boldly crossed to Boston--it
+would surely have sunk the stoutest Cunarder--and she couldn't pretend
+that she faced the prospect simply because Milly had had a caprice. She
+was in the act herself of having one, directed precisely to their
+present spectacle. She could but seek strength in the thought that she
+had never had one--or had never yielded to one, which came to the same
+thing--before. The sustaining sense of it all, moreover, as literary
+material--that quite dropped from her. She must wait, at any rate, she
+should see: it struck her, so far as she had got, as vast, obscure,
+lurid. She reflected in the watches of the night that she was probably
+just going to love it for itself--that is for itself and Milly. The odd
+thing was that she could think of Milly's loving it without dread--or
+with dread, at least not on the score of conscience, only on the score
+of peace. It was a mercy, at all events, for the hour, that their
+fancies jumped together.
+
+While, for this first week that followed their dinner, she drank deep
+at Lancaster Gate, her companion was no less happily, appeared to be
+indeed on the whole quite as romantically, provided for. The handsome
+English girl from the heavy English house had been as a figure in a
+picture stepping by magic out of its frame: it was a case, in truth,
+for which Mrs. Stringham presently found the perfect image. She had
+lost none of her grasp, but quite the contrary, of that other conceit
+in virtue of which Milly was the wandering princess: so what could be
+more in harmony now than to see the princess waited upon at the city
+gate by the worthiest maiden, the chosen daughter of the burgesses? It
+was the real again, evidently, the amusement of the meeting for the
+princess too; princesses living for the most part, in such an appeased
+way, on the plane of mere elegant representation. That was why they
+pounced, at city gates, on deputed flower-strewing damsels; that was
+why, after effigies, processions, and other stately games, frank human
+company was pleasant to them. Kate Croy really presented herself to
+Milly--the latter abounded for Mrs. Stringham in accounts of it--as the
+wondrous London girl in person, by what she had conceived, from far
+back, of the London girl; conceived from the tales of travellers and
+the anecdotes of New York, from old porings over _Punch_ and a liberal
+acquaintance with the fiction of the day. The only thing was that she
+was nicer, for the creature in question had rather been, to our young
+woman, an image of dread. She had thought of her, at her best, as
+handsome just as Kate was, with turns of head and tones of voice,
+felicities of stature and attitude, things "put on" and, for that
+matter, put off, all the marks of the product of a packed society who
+should be at the same time the heroine of a strong story. She placed
+this striking young person from the first in a story, saw her, by a
+necessity of the imagination, for a heroine, felt it the only character
+in which she wouldn't be wasted; and this in spite of the heroine's
+pleasant abruptness, her forbearance from gush, her umbrellas and
+jackets and shoes--as these things sketched themselves to Milly--and
+something rather of a breezy boy in the carriage of her arms and the
+occasional freedom of her slang.
+
+When Milly had settled that the extent of her goodwill itself made her
+shy, she had found for the moment quite a sufficient key, and they were
+by that time thoroughly afloat together. This might well have been the
+happiest hour they were to know, attacking in friendly independence
+their great London--the London of shops and streets and suburbs oddly
+interesting to Milly, as well as of museums, monuments, "sights" oddly
+unfamiliar to Kate, while their elders pursued a separate course, both
+rejoicing in their intimacy and each thinking the other's young woman a
+great acquisition for her own. Milly expressed to Susan Shepherd more
+than once that Kate had some secret, some smothered trouble, besides
+all the rest of her history; and that if she had so good-naturedly
+helped Mrs. Lowder to meet them this was exactly to create a diversion,
+to give herself something else to think about. But on the case thus
+postulated our young American had as yet had no light: she only felt
+that when the light should come it would greatly deepen the colour; and
+she liked to think she was prepared for anything. What she already
+knew, moreover, was full to her vision, of English, of eccentric, of
+Thackerayan character, Kate Croy having gradually become not a little
+explicit on the subject of her situation, her past, her present, her
+general predicament, her small success, up to the present hour, in
+contenting at the same time her father, her sister, her aunt and
+herself. It was Milly's subtle guess, imparted to her Susie, that the
+girl had somebody else as well, as yet unnamed, to content, it being
+manifest that such a creature couldn't help having; a creature not
+perhaps, if one would, exactly formed to inspire passions, since that
+always implied a certain silliness, but essentially seen, by the
+admiring eye of friendship, under the clear shadow of some probably
+eminent male interest. The clear shadow, from whatever source
+projected, hung, at any rate, over Milly's companion the whole week,
+and Kate Croy's handsome face smiled out of it, under bland skylights,
+in the presence alike of old masters passive in their glory and of
+thoroughly new ones, the newest, who bristled restlessly with pins and
+brandished snipping shears.
+
+It was meanwhile a pretty part of the intercourse of these young ladies
+that each thought the other more remarkable than herself--that each
+thought herself, or assured the other she did, a comparatively dusty
+object and the other a favourite of nature and of fortune. Kate was
+amused, amazed at the way her friend insisted on "taking" her, and
+Milly wondered if Kate were sincere in finding her the most
+extraordinary--quite apart from her being the most charming--person she
+had come across. They had talked, in long drives, and quantities of
+history had not been wanting--in the light of which Mrs. Lowder's niece
+might superficially seem to have had the best of the argument. Her
+visitor's American references, with their bewildering immensities,
+their confounding moneyed New York, their excitements of high pressure,
+their opportunities of wild freedom, their record of used-up relatives,
+parents, clever, eager, fair, slim brothers--these the most loved--all
+engaged, as well as successive superseded guardians, in a high
+extravagance of speculation and dissipation that had left this
+exquisite being her black dress, her white face and her vivid hair as
+the mere last broken link: such a picture quite threw into the shade
+the brief biography, however sketchily amplified, of a mere
+middle-class nobody in Bayswater. And though that indeed might be but a
+Bayswater way of putting it, in addition to which Milly was in the
+stage of interest in Bayswater ways, this critic so far prevailed that,
+like Mrs. Stringham herself, she fairly got her companion to accept
+from her that she was quite the nearest approach to a practical
+princess Bayswater could hope ever to know. It was a fact--it became
+one at the end of three days--that Milly actually began to borrow from
+the handsome girl a sort of view of her state; the handsome girl's
+impression of it was clearly so sincere. This impression was a tribute,
+a tribute positively to power, power the source of which was the last
+thing Kate treated as a mystery. There were passages, under all their
+skylights, the succession of their shops being large, in which the
+latter's easy, yet the least bit dry manner sufficiently gave out that
+if she had had so deep a pocket----!
+
+It was not moreover by any means with not having the imagination of
+expenditure that she appeared to charge her friend, but with not having
+the imagination of terror, of thrift, the imagination or in any degree
+the habit of a conscious dependence on others. Such moments, when all
+Wigmore Street, for instance, seemed to rustle about and the pale girl
+herself to be facing the different rustlers, usually so
+undiscriminated, as individual Britons too, Britons personal, parties
+to a relation and perhaps even intrinsically remarkable--such moments
+in especial determined in Kate a perception of the high happiness of
+her companion's liberty. Milly's range was thus immense; she had to ask
+nobody for anything, to refer nothing to any one; her freedom, her
+fortune and her fancy were her law; an obsequious world surrounded her,
+she could sniff up at every step its fumes. And Kate, in these days,
+was altogether in the phase of forgiving her so much bliss; in the
+phase moreover of believing that, should they continue to go on
+together, she would abide in that generosity. She had, at such a point
+as this, no suspicion of a rift within the lute--by which we mean not
+only none of anything's coming between them, but none of any definite
+flaw in so much clearness of quality. Yet, all the same, if Milly, at
+Mrs. Lowder's banquet, had described herself to Lord Mark as kindly
+used by the young woman on the other side because of some faintly-felt
+special propriety in it, so there really did match with this,
+privately, on the young woman's part, a feeling not analysed but
+divided, a latent impression that Mildred Theale was not, after all, a
+person to change places, to change even chances with. Kate, verily,
+would perhaps not quite have known what she meant by this reservation,
+and she came near naming it only when she said to herself that, rich as
+Milly was, one probably wouldn't--which was singular--ever hate her for
+it. The handsome girl had, with herself, these felicities and
+crudities: it wasn't obscure to her that, without some very particular
+reason to help, it might have proved a test of one's philosophy not to
+be irritated by a mistress of millions, or whatever they were, who, as
+a girl, so easily might have been, like herself, only vague and fatally
+female. She was by no means sure of liking Aunt Maud as much as she
+deserved, and Aunt Maud's command of funds was obviously inferior to
+Milly's. There was thus clearly, as pleading for the latter, some
+influence that would later on become distinct; and meanwhile,
+decidedly, it was enough that she was as charming as she was queer and
+as queer as she was charming--all of which was a rare amusement; as
+well, for that matter, as further sufficient that there were objects of
+value she had already pressed on Kate's acceptance. A week of her
+society in these conditions--conditions that Milly chose to sum up as
+ministering immensely, for a blind, vague pilgrim, to aid and
+comfort--announced itself from an early hour as likely to become a week
+of presents, acknowledgments, mementos, pledges of gratitude and
+admiration that were all on one side. Kate as promptly embraced the
+propriety of making it clear that she must forswear shops till she
+should receive some guarantee that the contents of each one she entered
+as a humble companion should not be placed at her feet; yet that was in
+truth not before she had found herself in possession, under whatever
+protests, of several precious ornaments and other minor conveniences.
+
+Great was the absurdity, too, that there should have come a day, by the
+end of the week, when it appeared that all Milly would have asked in
+definite "return," as might be said, was to be told a little about Lord
+Mark and to be promised the privilege of a visit to Mrs. Condrip. Far
+other amusements had been offered her, but her eagerness was
+shamelessly human, and she seemed really to count more on the
+revelation of the anxious lady of Chelsea than on the best nights of
+the opera. Kate admired, and showed it, such an absence of fear: to the
+fear of being bored, in such a connection, she would have been so
+obviously entitled. Milly's answer to this was the plea of her
+curiosities--which left her friend wondering as to their odd direction.
+Some among them, no doubt, were rather more intelligible, and Kate had
+heard without wonder that she was blank about Lord Mark. This young
+lady's account of him, at the same time, professed itself as frankly
+imperfect; for what they best knew him by at Lancaster Gate was a thing
+difficult to explain. One knew people in general by something they had
+to show, something that, either for them or against, could be touched
+or named or proved; and she could think of no other case of a value
+taken as so great and yet flourishing untested. His value was his
+future, which had somehow got itself as accepted by Aunt Maud as if it
+had been his good cook or his steam-launch. She, Kate, didn't mean she
+thought him a humbug; he might do great things--but they were all, as
+yet, so to speak, he had done. On the other hand it was of course
+something of an achievement, and not open to every one, to have got
+one's self taken so seriously by Aunt Maud. The best thing about him,
+doubtless, on the whole, was that Aunt Maud believed in him. She was
+often fantastic, but she knew a humbug, and--no, Lord Mark wasn't that.
+He had been a short time in the House, on the Tory side, but had lost
+his seat on the first opportunity, and this was all he had to point to.
+However, he pointed to nothing; which was very possibly just a sign of
+his real cleverness, one of those that the really clever had in common
+with the really void. Even Aunt Maud frequently admitted that there was
+a good deal, for her view of him, to come up in the rear. And he wasn't
+meanwhile himself indifferent--indifferent to himself--for he was
+working Lancaster Gate for all it was worth: just as it was, no doubt,
+working _him,_ and just as the working and the worked were in London,
+as one might explain, the parties to every relation.
+
+Kate did explain, for her listening friend: every one who had anything
+to give--it was true they were the fewest--made the sharpest possible
+bargain for it, got at least its value in return. The strangest thing,
+furthermore, was that this might be, in cases, a happy understanding.
+The worker in one connection was the worked in another; it was as broad
+as it was long--with the wheels of the system, as might be seen,
+wonderfully oiled. People could quite like each other in the midst of
+it, as Aunt Maud, by every appearance, quite liked Lord Mark, and as
+Lord Mark, it was to be hoped, liked Mrs. Lowder, since if he didn't he
+was a greater brute than one could believe. She, Kate, had not yet, it
+was true, made out what he was doing for her--besides which the dear
+woman needed him, even at the most he could do, much less than she
+imagined; so far as all of which went, moreover, there were plenty of
+things on every side she had not yet made out. She believed, on the
+whole, in any one Aunt Maud took up; and she gave it to Milly as worth
+thinking of that, whatever wonderful people this young lady might meet
+in the land, she would meet no more extraordinary woman. There were
+greater celebrities by the million, and of course greater swells, but a
+bigger _person,_ by Kate's view, and a larger natural handful every
+way, would really be far to seek. When Milly inquired with interest if
+Kate's belief in _her_ was primarily on the lines of what Mrs. Lowder
+"took up," her interlocutress could handsomely say yes, since by the
+same principle she believed in herself. Whom but Aunt Maud's niece,
+pre-eminently, had Aunt Maud taken up, and who was thus more in the
+current, with her, of working and of being worked? "You may ask," Kate
+said, "what in the world I have to give; and that indeed is just what
+I'm trying to learn. There must be something, for her to think she can
+get it out of me. She _will_ get it--trust her; and then I shall see
+what it is; which I beg you to believe I should never have found out
+for myself." She declined to treat any question of Milly's own "paying"
+power as discussable; that Milly would pay a hundred per cent.--and
+even to the end, doubtless, through the nose--was just the beautiful
+basis on which they found themselves.
+
+These were fine facilities, pleasantries, ironies, all these luxuries
+of gossip and philosophies of London and of life, and they became
+quickly, between the pair, the common form of talk, Milly professing
+herself delighted to know that something was to be done with her. If
+the most remarkable woman in England was to do it, so much the better,
+and if the most remarkable woman in England had them both in hand
+together, why, what could be jollier for each? When she reflected
+indeed a little on the oddity of her wanting two at once, Kate had the
+natural reply that it was exactly what showed her sincerity. She
+invariably gave way to feeling, and feeling had distinctly popped up in
+her on the advent of her girlhood's friend. The way the cat would jump
+was always, in presence of anything that moved her, interesting to see;
+visibly enough, moreover, for a long time, it hadn't jumped anything
+like so far. This, in fact, as we already know, remained the marvel for
+Milly Theale, who, on sight of Mrs. Lowder, found fifty links in
+respect to Susie absent from the chain of association. She knew so
+herself what she thought of Susie that she would have expected the lady
+of Lancaster Gate to think something quite different; the failure of
+which endlessly mystified her. But her mystification was the cause for
+her of another fine impression, inasmuch as when she went so far as to
+observe to Kate that Susan Shepherd--and especially Susan Shepherd
+emerging so uninvited from an irrelevant past--ought, by all the
+proprieties, simply to have bored Aunt Maud, her confidant agreed with
+her without a protest and abounded in the sense of her wonder. Susan
+Shepherd at least bored the niece--that was plain; this young woman saw
+nothing in her--nothing to account for anything, not even for Milly's
+own indulgence: which little fact became in turn to the latter's mind a
+fact of significance. It was a light on the handsome girl--representing
+more than merely showed--that poor Susie was simply as nought to her.
+This was, in a manner too, a general admonition to poor Susie's
+companion, who seemed to see marked by it the direction in which she
+had best most look out.
+
+It just faintly rankled in her that a person who was good enough and to
+spare for Milly Theale shouldn't be good enough for another girl;
+though, oddly enough, she could easily have forgiven Mrs. Lowder
+herself the impatience. Mrs. Lowder didn't feel it, and Kate Croy felt
+it with ease; yet in the end, be it added, she grasped the reason, and
+the reason enriched her mind. Wasn't it sufficiently the reason that
+the handsome girl was, with twenty other splendid qualities, the least
+bit brutal too, and didn't she suggest, as no one yet had ever done for
+her new friend, that there might be a wild beauty in that, and even a
+strange grace? Kate wasn't brutally brutal--which Milly had hitherto
+benightedly supposed the only way; she wasn't even aggressively so, but
+rather indifferently, defensively and, as might be said, by the habit
+of anticipation. She simplified in advance, was beforehand with her
+doubts, and knew with singular quickness what she wasn't, as they said
+in New York, going to like. In that way at least people were clearly
+quicker in England than at home; and Milly could quite see, after a
+little, how such instincts might become usual in a world in which
+dangers abounded. There were more dangers, clearly, round about
+Lancaster Gate than one suspected in New York or could dream of in
+Boston. At all events, with more sense of them, there were more
+precautions, and it was a remarkable world altogether in which there
+could be precautions, on whatever ground, against Susie.
+
+
+IX
+
+She certainly made up with Susie directly, however, for any allowance
+she might have had privately to extend to tepid appreciation; since the
+late and long talks of these two embraced not only everything offered
+and suggested by the hours they spent apart, but a good deal more
+besides. She might be as detached as the occasion required at four
+o'clock in the afternoon, but she used no such freedom to any one about
+anything as she habitually used about everything to Susan Shepherd at
+midnight. All the same, it should with much less delay than this have
+been mentioned, she had not yet--had not, that is, at the end of six
+days--produced any news for her comrade to compare with an announcement
+made her by the latter as a result of a drive with Mrs. Lowder, for a
+change, in the remarkable Battersea Park. The elder friends had
+sociably revolved there while the younger ones followed bolder fancies
+in the admirable equipage appointed to Milly at the hotel--a heavier,
+more emblazoned, more amusing chariot than she had ever, with "stables"
+notoriously mismanaged, known at home; whereby, in the course of the
+circuit, more than once repeated, it had "come out," as Mrs. Stringham
+said, that the couple at Lancaster Gate were, of all people, acquainted
+with Mildred's other English friend--the gentleman, the one connected
+with the English newspaper (Susie hung fire a little over his name) who
+had been with her in New York so shortly previous to present
+adventures. He had been named of course in Battersea Park--else he
+couldn't have been identified; and Susie had naturally, before she
+could produce her own share in the matter as a kind of confession, to
+make it plain that her allusion was to Mr. Merton Densher. This was
+because Milly had at first a little air of not knowing whom she meant;
+and the girl really kept, as well, a certain control of herself while
+she remarked that the case was surprising, the chance one in a
+thousand. They knew him, both Maud and Miss Croy knew him, she gathered
+too, rather well, though indeed it was not on any show of intimacy that
+he had happened to be mentioned. It had not been--Susie made the
+point--she herself who brought him in: he had in fact not been brought
+in at all, but only referred to as a young journalist known to Mrs.
+Lowder and who had lately gone to their wonderful country--Mrs. Lowder
+always said "your wonderful country"--on behalf of his journal. But
+Mrs. Stringham had taken it up--with the tips of her fingers indeed;
+and that was the confession: she had, without meaning any harm,
+recognised Mr. Densher as an acquaintance of Milly's, though she had
+also pulled herself up before getting in too far. Mrs. Lowder had been
+struck, clearly--it wasn't too much to say; then she also, it had
+rather seemed, had pulled herself up; and there had been a little
+moment during which each might have been keeping something from the
+other. "Only," said Milly's mate, "I luckily remembered in time that I
+had nothing whatever to keep--which was much simpler and nicer. I don't
+know what Maud has, but there it is. She was interested, distinctly, in
+your knowing him--in his having met you over there with so little loss
+of time. But I ventured to tell her it hadn't been so long as to make
+you as yet great friends. I don't know if I was right."
+
+Whatever time this explanation might have taken, there had been moments
+enough in the matter now--before the elder woman's conscience had done
+itself justice--to enable Milly to reply that although the fact in
+question doubtless had its importance she imagined they wouldn't find
+the importance overwhelming. It _was_ odd that their one Englishman
+should so instantly fit; it wasn't, however, miraculous--they surely
+all had often seen that, as every one said, the world was
+extraordinarily "small." Undoubtedly, too, Susie had done just the
+plain thing in not letting his name pass. Why in the world should there
+be a mystery?--and what an immense one they would appear to have made
+if he should come back and find they had concealed their knowledge of
+him! "I don't know, Susie dear," the girl observed, "what you think I
+have to conceal."
+
+"It doesn't matter, at a given moment," Mrs. Stringham returned, "what
+you know or don't know as to what I think; for you always find out the
+very next moment, and when you do find out, dearest, you never _really_
+care. Only," she presently asked, "have you heard of him from Miss
+Croy?"
+
+"Heard of Mr. Densher? Never a word. We haven't mentioned him. Why
+should we?"
+
+"That _you_ haven't, I understand; but that she hasn't," Susie opined,
+"may mean something."
+
+"May mean what?"
+
+"Well," Mrs. Stringham presently brought out, "I tell you all when I
+tell you that Maud asks me to suggest to you that it may perhaps be
+better for the present not to speak of him: not to speak of him to her
+niece, that is, unless she herself speaks to you first. But Maud thinks
+she won't."
+
+Milly was ready to engage for anything; but in respect to the facts--as
+they so far possessed them--it all sounded a little complicated. "Is it
+because there's anything between them?"
+
+"No--I gather not; but Maud's state of mind is precautionary. She's
+afraid of something. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say she's
+afraid of everything."
+
+"She's afraid, you mean," Milly asked, "of their--a--liking each other?"
+
+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; and another
+person present at such times might have wondered to what inner thought
+of her own the good lady was trying to fit the speech. It was too much
+her disposition, no doubt, to treat her young companion's words as
+symptoms of an imputed malady. It was none the less, however, her
+highest law to be light when the girl was light. She knew how to be
+quaint with the new quaintness--the great Boston gift; it had been,
+happily, her note in the magazines; and Maud Lowder, to whom it was new
+indeed and who had never heard anything remotely like it, quite
+cherished her, as a social resource, for it. It should not therefore
+fail her now; with it in fact one might face most things. "Ah, then let
+us hope we shall sound the depths--I'm prepared for the worst--of
+sorrow and sin! But she would like her niece--we're not ignorant of
+that, are we?--to marry Lord Mark. Hasn't she told you so?"
+
+"Hasn't Mrs. Lowder told me?"
+
+"No; hasn't Kate? It isn't, you know, that she doesn't know it."
+
+Milly had, under her comrade's eyes, a minute of mute detachment. She
+had lived with Kate Croy for several days in a state of intimacy as
+deep as it had been sudden, and they had clearly, in talk, in many
+directions, proceeded to various extremities. Yet it now came over her
+as in a clear cold way that there was a possible account of their
+relations in which the quantity her new friend had told her might have
+figured as small, as smallest, beside the quantity she hadn't. She
+couldn't say, at any rate, whether or no she had made the point that
+her aunt designed her for Lord Mark: it had only sufficiently come
+out--which had been, moreover, eminently guessable--that she was
+involved in her aunt's designs. Somehow, for Milly, brush it over
+nervously as she might and with whatever simplifying hand, this abrupt
+extrusion of Mr. Densher altered all proportions, had an effect on all
+values. It was fantastic of her to let it make a difference that she
+couldn't in the least have defined--and she was at least, even during
+these instants, rather proud of being able to hide, on the spot, the
+difference it did make. Yet, all the same, the effect for her was,
+almost violently, of Mr. Densher's having been there--having been where
+she had stood till now in her simplicity--before her. It would have
+taken but another free moment to make her see abysses--since abysses
+were what she wanted--in the mere circumstance of his own silence, in
+New York, about his English friends. There had really been in New York
+little time for anything; but, had she liked, Milly could have made it
+out for herself that he had avoided the subject of Miss Croy, and that
+Miss Croy was yet a subject it could never be natural to avoid. It was
+to be added at the same time that even if his silence had been
+labyrinthe--which was absurd in view of all the other things too he
+couldn't possibly have spoken of--this was exactly what must suit her,
+since it fell under the head of the plea she had just uttered to Susie.
+These things, however, came and went, and it set itself up between the
+companions, for the occasion, in the oddest way, both that their
+happening all to know Mr. Densher--except indeed that Susie didn't, but
+probably would,--was a fact belonging, in a world of rushing about, to
+one of the common orders of chance; and yet further that it was
+amusing--oh, awfully amusing!--to be able fondly to hope that there was
+"something in" its having been left to crop up with such suddenness.
+There seemed somehow a possibility that the ground or, as it were, the
+air might, in a manner, have undergone some pleasing preparation;
+though the question of this possibility would probably, after all, have
+taken some threshing out. The truth, moreover--and there they were,
+already, our pair, talking about it, the "truth!"--had not in fact
+quite cropped out. This, obviously, in view of Mrs. Lowder's request to
+her old friend.
+
+It was accordingly on Mrs. Lowder's recommendation that nothing should
+be said to Kate--it was on this rich attitude of Aunt Maud's that the
+idea of an interesting complication might best hope to perch; and when,
+in fact, after the colloquy we have reported Milly saw Kate again
+without mentioning any name, her silence succeeded in passing muster
+with her as the beginning of a new sort of fun. The sort was all the
+newer by reason of its containing a small element of anxiety: when she
+had gone in for fun before it had been with her hands a little more
+free. Yet it _was,_ none the less, rather exciting to be conscious of a
+still sharper reason for interest in the handsome girl, as Kate
+continued, even now, pre-eminently to remain for her; and a
+reason--this was the great point--of which the young woman herself
+could have no suspicion. Twice over, thus, for two or three hours
+together, Milly found herself seeing Kate, quite fixing her in the
+light of the knowledge that it was a face on which Mr. Densher's eyes
+had more or less familiarly rested and which, by the same token, had
+looked, rather _more_ beautifully than less, into his own. She pulled
+herself up indeed with the thought that it had inevitably looked, as
+beautifully as one would, into thousands of faces in which one might
+one's self never trace it; but just the odd result of the thought was
+to intensify for the girl that side of her friend which she had
+doubtless already been more prepared than she quite knew to think of as
+the "other," the not wholly calculable. It was fantastic, and Milly was
+aware of this; but the other side was what had, of a sudden, been
+turned straight towards her by the show of Mr. Densher's propinquity.
+She hadn't the excuse of knowing it for Kate's own, since nothing
+whatever as yet proved it particularly to be such. Never mind; it was
+with this other side now fully presented that Kate came and went,
+kissed her for greeting and for parting, talked, as usual, of
+everything but--as it had so abruptly become for Milly--_the_ thing.
+Our young woman, it is true, would doubtless not have tasted so sharply
+a difference in this pair of occasions had she not been tasting so
+peculiarly her own possible betrayals. What happened was that
+afterwards, on separation, she wondered if the matter had not mainly
+been that she herself was so "other," so taken up with the unspoken;
+the strangest thing of all being, still subsequently, that when she
+asked herself how Kate could have failed to feel it she became
+conscious of being here on the edge of a great darkness. She should
+never know how Kate truly felt about anything such a one as Milly
+Theale should give her to feel. Kate would never--and not from
+ill-will, nor from duplicity, but from a sort of failure of common
+terms--reduce it to such a one's comprehension or put it within her
+convenience.
+
+It was as such a one, therefore, that, for three or four days more,
+Milly watched Kate as just such another; and it was presently as such a
+one that she threw herself into their promised visit, at last achieved,
+to Chelsea, the quarter of the famous Carlyle, the field of exercise of
+his ghost, his votaries, and the residence of "poor Marian," so often
+referred to and actually a somewhat incongruous spirit there. With our
+young woman's first view of poor Marian everything gave way but the
+sense of how, in England, apparently, the social situation of sisters
+could be opposed, how common ground, for a place in the world, could
+quite fail them: a state of things sagely perceived to be involved in
+an hierarchical, an aristocratic order. Just whereabouts in the order
+Mrs. Lowder had established her niece was a question not wholly void,
+as yet, no doubt, of ambiguity--though Milly was withal sure Lord Mark
+could exactly have fixed the point if he would, fixing it at the same
+time for Aunt Maud herself; but it was clear that Mrs. Condrip was, as
+might have been said, in quite another geography. She would not, in
+short, have been to be found on the same social map, and it was as if
+her visitors had turned over page after page together before the final
+relief of their benevolent "Here!" The interval was bridged, of course,
+but the bridge, verily, was needed, and the impression left Milly to
+wonder whether, in the general connection, it were of bridges or of
+intervals that the spirit not locally disciplined would find itself
+most conscious. It was as if at home, by contrast, there were
+neither--neither the difference itself, from position to position, nor,
+on either side, and particularly on one, the awfully good manner, the
+conscious sinking of a consciousness, that made up for it. The
+conscious sinking, at all events, and the awfully good manner, the
+difference, the bridge, the interval, the skipped leaves of the social
+atlas--these, it was to be confessed, had a little, for our young lady,
+in default of stouter stuff, to work themselves into the light literary
+legend--a mixed, wandering echo of Trollope, of Thackeray, perhaps
+mostly of Dickens--under favour of which her pilgrimage had so much
+appealed. She could relate to Susie later on, late the same evening,
+that the legend, before she had done with it, had run clear, that the
+adored author of _The Newcomes_, in fine, had been on the whole the
+note: the picture lacking thus more than she had hoped, or rather
+perhaps showing less than she had feared, a certain possibility of
+Pickwickian outline. She explained how she meant by this that Mrs.
+Condrip had not altogether proved another Mrs. Nickleby, nor even--for
+she might have proved almost anything, from the way poor worried Kate
+had spoken--a widowed and aggravated Mrs. Micawber.
+
+Mrs. Stringham, in the midnight conference, intimated rather yearningly
+that, however the event might have turned, the side of English life
+such experiences opened to Milly were just those she herself seemed
+"booked"--as they were all, roundabout her now, always saying--to miss:
+she had begun to have a little, for her fellow-observer, these moments
+of fanciful reaction--reaction in which she was once more all Susan
+Shepherd--against the high sphere of colder conventions into which her
+overwhelming connection with Maud Manningham had rapt her. Milly never
+lost sight, for long, of the Susan Shepherd side of her, and was always
+there to meet it when it came up and vaguely, tenderly, impatiently to
+pat it, abounding in the assurance that they would still provide for
+it. They had, however, to-night, another matter in hand; which proved
+to be presently, on the girl's part, in respect to her hour of Chelsea,
+the revelation that Mrs. Condrip, taking a few minutes when Kate was
+away with one of the children, in bed upstairs for some small
+complaint, had suddenly, without its being in the least "led up to,"
+broken ground on the subject of Mr. Densher, mentioned him with
+impatience as a person in love with her sister. "She wished me, if I
+cared for Kate, to know," Milly said--"for it would be quite too
+dreadful, and one might do something."
+
+Susie wondered. "Prevent anything coming of it? That's easily said. Do
+what?"
+
+Milly had a dim smile. "I think that what she would like is that I
+should come a good deal to see her about it."
+
+"And doesn't she suppose you've anything else to do?"
+
+The girl had by this time clearly made it out. "Nothing but to admire
+and make much of her sister--whom she doesn't, however, herself in the
+least understand--and give up one's time, and everything else, to it."
+It struck the elder friend that she spoke with an almost unprecedented
+approach to sharpness; as if Mrs. Condrip had been rather specially
+disconcerting. Never yet so much as just of late had Mrs. Stringham
+seen her companion as exalted, and by the very play of something
+within, into a vague golden air that left irritation below. That was
+the great thing with Milly--it was her characteristic poetry; or at
+least it was Susan Shepherd's. "But she made a point," the former
+continued, "of my keeping what she says from Kate. I'm not to mention
+that she has spoken."
+
+"And why," Mrs. Stringham presently asked, "is Mr. Densher so dreadful?"
+
+Milly had, she thought, an hesitation--something that suggested a
+fuller talk with Mrs. Condrip than she inclined perhaps to report. "It
+isn't so much he himself." Then the girl spoke a little as for the
+romance of it; one could never tell, with her, where romance would come
+in. "It's the state of his fortunes."
+
+"And is that very bad?"
+
+"He has no 'private means,' and no prospect of any. He has no income,
+and no ability, according to Mrs. Condrip, to make one. He's as poor,
+she calls it, as 'poverty,' and she says she knows what that is."
+
+Again Mrs. Stringham considered, and it presently produced something.
+"But isn't he brilliantly clever?"
+
+Milly had also then an instant that was not quite fruitless. "I haven't
+the least idea."
+
+To which, for the time, Susie only answered "Oh!"--though by the end of
+a minute she had followed it with a slightly musing "I see"; and that
+in turn with: "It's quite what Maud Lowder thinks."
+
+"That he'll never do anything?"
+
+"No--quite the contrary: that he's exceptionally able."
+
+"Oh yes; I know"--Milly had again, in reference to what her friend had
+already told her of this, her little tone of a moment before. "But Mrs.
+Condrip's own great point is that Aunt Maud herself won't hear of any
+such person. Mr. Densher, she holds that's the way, at any rate, it was
+explained to me--won't ever be either a public man or a rich man. If he
+were public she'd be willing, as I understand, to help him; if he were
+rich--without being anything else--she'd do her best to swallow him. As
+it is, she taboos him."
+
+"In short," said Mrs. Stringham as with a private purpose, "she told
+you, the sister, all about it. But Mrs. Lowder likes him," she added.
+
+"Mrs. Condrip didn't tell me that."
+
+"Well, she does, all the same, my dear, extremely."
+
+"Then there it is!" On which, with a drop and one of those sudden,
+slightly sighing surrenders to a vague reflux and a general fatigue
+that had recently more than once marked themselves for her companion,
+Milly turned away. Yet the matter was not left so, that night, between
+them, albeit neither perhaps could afterwards have said which had first
+come back to it. Milly's own nearest approach, at least, for a little,
+to doing so, was to remark that they appeared all--every one they
+saw--to think tremendously of money. This prompted in Susie a laugh,
+not untender, the innocent meaning of which was that it came, as a
+subject for indifference, money did, easier to some people than to
+others: she made the point in fairness, however, that you couldn't have
+told, by any too crude transparency of air, what place it held for Maud
+Manningham. She did her worldliness with grand proper silences--if it
+mightn't better be put perhaps that she did her detachment with grand
+occasional pushes. However Susie put it, in truth, she was really, in
+justice to herself, thinking of the difference, as favourites of
+fortune, between her old friend and her new. Aunt Maud sat somehow in
+the midst of her money, founded on it and surrounded by it, even if
+with a clever high manner about it, her manner of looking, hard and
+bright, as if it weren't there. Milly, about hers, had no manner at
+all--which was possibly, from a point of view, a fault: she was at any
+rate far away on the edge of it, and you hadn't, as might be said, in
+order to get at her nature, to traverse, by whatever avenue, any piece
+of her property. It was clear, on the other hand, that Mrs. Lowder was
+keeping her wealth as for purposes, imaginations, ambitions, that would
+figure as large, as honourably unselfish, on the day they should take
+effect. She would impose her will, but her will would be only that a
+person or two shouldn't lose a benefit by not submitting if they could
+be made to submit. To Milly, as so much younger, such far views
+couldn't be imputed: there was nobody she was supposable as interested
+for. It was too soon, since she wasn't interested for herself. Even the
+richest woman, at her age, lacked motive, and Milly's motive doubtless
+had plenty of time to arrive. She was meanwhile beautiful, simple,
+sublime without it--whether missing it and vaguely reaching out for it
+or not; and with it, for that matter, in the event, would really be
+these things just as much. Only then she might very well have, like
+Aunt Maud, a manner. Such were the connections, at all events, in which
+the colloquy of our two ladies freshly flickered up--in which it came
+round that the elder asked the younger if she had herself, in the
+afternoon, named Mr. Densher as an acquaintance.
+
+"Oh no--I said nothing of having seen him. I remembered," the girl
+explained, "Mrs. Lowder's wish."
+
+"But that," her friend observed after a moment, "was for silence to
+Kate."
+
+"Yes--but Mrs. Condrip would immediately have told Kate."
+
+"Why so?--since she must dislike to talk about him."
+
+"Mrs. Condrip must?" Milly thought. "What she would like most is that
+her sister should be brought to think ill of him; and if anything she
+can tell her will help that--" But Milly dropped suddenly here, as if
+her companion would see.
+
+Her companion's interest, however, was all for what she herself saw.
+"You mean she'll immediately speak?" Mrs. Stringham gathered that this
+was what Milly meant, but it left still a question. "How will it be
+against him that you know him?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. It won't be so much one's knowing him as one's
+having kept it out of sight."
+
+"Ah," said Mrs. Stringham, as if for comfort, _"you_ haven't kept it
+out of sight. Isn't it much rather Miss Croy herself who has?"
+
+"It isn't my acquaintance with him," Milly smiled, "that she has
+dissimulated."
+
+"She has dissimulated only her own? Well then, the responsibility's
+hers."
+
+"Ah but," said the girl, not perhaps with marked consequence, "she has
+a right to do as she likes."
+
+"Then so, my dear, have you!" smiled Susan Shepherd.
+
+Milly looked at her as if she were almost venerably simple, but also as
+if this were what one loved her for. "We're not quarrelling about it,
+Kate and I, _yet."_
+
+"I only meant," Mrs. Stringham explained, "that I don't see what Mrs.
+Condrip would gain."
+
+"By her being able to tell Kate?" Milly thought. "I only meant that I
+don't see what I myself should gain."
+
+"But it will have to come out--that he knows you both--some time."
+
+Milly scarce assented. "Do you mean when he comes back?"
+
+"He'll find you both here, and he can hardly be looked to, I take it,
+to 'cut' either of you for the sake of the other."
+
+This placed the question at last on a basis more distinctly cheerful.
+"I might get at him somehow beforehand," the girl suggested; "I might
+give him what they call here the tip--that he's not to know me when we
+meet. Or, better still, I mightn't be here at all."
+
+"Do you want to run away from him?"
+
+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. The sense
+was constant for her that their relation was as if afloat, like some
+island of the south, in a great warm sea that made, for every
+conceivable chance, a margin, an outer sphere of general emotion; and
+the effect of the occurrence of anything in particular was to make the
+sea submerge the island, the margin flood the text. The great wave now
+for a moment swept over. "I'll go anywhere else in the world you like."
+
+But Milly came up through it. "Dear old Susie--how I do work you!"
+
+"Oh, this is nothing yet."
+
+"No indeed--to what it will be."
+
+"You're not--and it's vain to pretend," said dear old Susie, who had
+been taking her in, "as sound and strong as I insist on having you."
+
+"Insist, insist--the more the better. But the day I _look_ as sound and
+strong as that, you know," Milly went on--"on that day I shall be just
+sound and strong enough to take leave of you sweetly for ever. That's
+where one is," she continued thus agreeably to embroider, "when even
+one's _most_ 'beaux moments' aren't such as to qualify, so far as
+appearance goes, for anything gayer than a handsome cemetery. Since
+I've lived all these years as if I were dead, I shall die, no doubt, as
+if I were alive--which will happen to be as you want me. So, you see,"
+she wound up, "you'll never really know where I am. Except indeed when
+I'm gone; and then you'll only know where I'm not."
+
+"I'd die _for_ you," said Susan Shepherd after a moment.
+
+"'Thanks awfully'! Then stay here for me."
+
+"But we can't be in London for August, nor for many of all these next
+weeks."
+
+"Then we'll go back."
+
+Susie blenched. "Back to America?"
+
+"No, abroad--to Switzerland, Italy, anywhere. I mean by your staying
+here for me," Milly pursued, "your staying with me wherever I may be,
+even though we may neither of us know at the time where it is. No," she
+insisted, "I _don't_ know where I am, and you never will, and it
+doesn't matter--and I dare say it's quite true," she broke off, "that
+everything will have to come out." Her friend would have felt of her
+that she joked about it now, had not her scale from grave to gay been a
+thing of such unnamable shades that her contrasts were never sharp. She
+made up for failures of gravity by failures of mirth; if she hadn't,
+that is, been at times as earnest as might have been liked, so she was
+certain not to be at other times as easy as she would like herself. "I
+must face the music. It isn't, at any rate, its 'coming out,'" she
+added; "it's that Mrs. Condrip would put the fact before her to his
+injury."
+
+Her companion wondered. "But how to _his?"_
+
+"Why, if he pretends to love her----!"
+
+"And does he only 'pretend'?"
+
+"I mean if, trusted by her in strange countries, he forgets her so far
+as to make up to other people."
+
+The amendment, however, brought Susie in, as if with gaiety, for a
+comfortable end. "Did he make up, the false creature, to _you?"_
+
+"No--but the question isn't of that. It's of what Kate might be made to
+believe."
+
+"That, given the fact that he evidently more or less followed up his
+acquaintance with you, to say nothing of your obvious weird charm, he
+must have been all ready if you had at all led him on?"
+
+Milly neither accepted nor qualified this; she only said, after a
+moment, as with a conscious excess of the pensive: "No, I don't think
+she'd quite wish to suggest that I made up to _him;_ for that I should
+have had to do so would only bring out his constancy. All I mean is,"
+she added--and now at last, as with a supreme impatience "that her
+being able to make him out a little a person who could give cause for
+jealousy would evidently help her, since she's afraid of him, to do him
+in her sister's mind a useful ill turn."
+
+Susan Shepherd perceived in this explanation such signs of an appetite
+for motive as would have sat gracefully even on one of her own New
+England heroines. It was seeing round several corners; but that was
+what New England heroines did, and it was moreover interesting for the
+moment to make out how many really her young friend had undertaken to
+see round. Finally, too, weren't they braving the deeps? They got their
+amusement where they could. "Isn't it only," she asked, "rather
+probable she'd see that Kate's knowing him as (what's the pretty old
+word?) _volage_----?"
+
+"Well?" She hadn't filled out her idea, but neither, it seemed, could
+Milly.
+
+"Well, might but do what that often does--by all _our_ blessed little
+laws and arrangements at least; excite Kate's own sentiment instead of
+depressing it."
+
+The idea was bright, yet the girl but beautifully stared. "Kate's own
+sentiment? Oh, she didn't speak of that. I don't think," she added as
+if she had been unconsciously giving a wrong impression, "I don't think
+Mrs. Condrip imagines _she's_ in love."
+
+It made Mrs. Stringham stare in turn. "Then what's her fear?"
+
+"Well, only the fact of Mr. Densher's possibly himself keeping it
+up--the fear of some final result from _that._
+
+"Oh," said Susie, intellectually a little disconcerted--"she looks far
+ahead!"
+
+At this, however, Milly threw off another of her sudden vague "sports."
+"No--it's only we who do."
+
+"Well, don't let us be more interested for them than they are for
+themselves!"
+
+"Certainly not"--the girl promptly assented. A certain interest
+nevertheless remained; she appeared to wish to be clear. "It wasn't of
+anything on Kate's own part she spoke."
+
+"You mean she thinks her sister does _not_ care for him?"
+
+It was still as if, for an instant, Milly had to be sure of what she
+meant; but there it presently was. "If she did care Mrs. Condrip would
+have told me."
+
+What Susan Shepherd seemed hereupon for a little to wonder was why then
+they had been talking so. "But did you ask her?"
+
+"Ah, no!"
+
+"Oh!" said Susan Shepherd.
+
+Milly, however, easily explained that she wouldn't have asked her for
+the world.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FIFTH
+
+X
+
+Lord Mark looked at her to-day in particular as if to wring from her a
+confession that she had originally done him injustice; and he was
+entitled to whatever there might be in it of advantage or merit that
+his intention really in a manner took effect: he cared about something,
+that is, after all, sufficiently to make her feel absurdly as if she
+_were_ confessing--all the while it was quite the case that neither
+justice nor injustice was what had been in question between them. He
+had presented himself at the hotel, had found her and had found Susan
+Shepherd at home, had been "civil" to Susan--it was just that shade,
+and Susan's fancy had fondly caught it; and then had come again and
+missed them, and then had come and found them once more: besides
+letting them easily see that if it hadn't by this time been the end of
+everything--which they could feel in the exhausted air, that of the
+season at its last gasp--the places they might have liked to go to were
+such as they would have had only to mention. Their feeling was--or at
+any rate their modest general plea--that there was no place they would
+have liked to go to; there was only the sense of finding they liked,
+wherever they were, the place to which they had been brought. Such was
+highly the case as to their current consciousness--which could be
+indeed, in an equally eminent degree, but a matter of course;
+impressions this afternoon having by a happy turn of their wheel been
+gathered for them into a splendid cluster, an offering like an armful
+of the rarest flowers. They were in presence of the offering--they had
+been led up to it; and if it had been still their habit to look at each
+other across distances for increase of unanimity his hand would have
+been silently named between them as the hand applied to the wheel. He
+had administered the touch that, under light analysis, made the
+difference--the difference of their not having lost, as Susie on the
+spot and at the hour phrased it again and again, both for herself and
+for such others as the question might concern, so beautiful and
+interesting an experience; the difference also, in fact, of Mrs.
+Lowder's not having lost it either, though it was with Mrs. Lowder,
+superficially, they had come, and though it was further with that lady
+that our young woman was directly engaged during the half-hour or so of
+her most agreeably inward response to the scene.
+
+The great historic house had, for Milly, beyond terrace and garden, as
+the centre of an almost extravagantly grand Watteau-composition, a tone
+as of old gold kept "down" by the quality of the air, summer
+full-flushed, but attuned to the general perfect taste. Much, by her
+measure, for the previous hour, appeared, in connection with this
+revelation of it, to have happened to her--a quantity expressed in
+introductions of charming new people, in walks through halls of armour,
+of pictures, of cabinets, of tapestry, of tea-tables, in an assault of
+reminders that this largeness of style was the sign of _appointed_
+felicity. The largeness of style was the great containing vessel, while
+everything else, the pleasant personal affluence, the easy, murmurous
+welcome, the honoured age of illustrious host and hostess, all at once
+so distinguished and so plain, so public and so shy, became but this or
+that element of the infusion. The elements melted together and seasoned
+the draught, the essence of which might have struck the girl as
+distilled into the small cup of iced coffee she had vaguely accepted
+from somebody, while a fuller flood, somehow, kept bearing her up--all
+the freshness of response of her young life the freshness of the first
+and only prime. What had perhaps brought on just now a kind of climax
+was the fact of her appearing to make out, through Aunt Maud, what was
+really the matter. It couldn't be less than a climax for a poor shaky
+maiden to find it put to her of a sudden that she herself was the
+matter--for that was positively what, on Mrs. Lowder's part, it came
+to. Everything was great, of course, in great pictures, and it was
+doubtless precisely a part of the brilliant life--since the brilliant
+life, as one had faintly figured it, clearly _was_ humanly led--that
+all impressions within its area partook of its brilliancy; still,
+letting that pass, it fairly stamped an hour as with the official seal
+for one to be able to take in so comfortably one's companion's broad
+blandness. "You must stay among us--you must stay; anything else is
+impossible and ridiculous; you don't know yet, no doubt--you can't; but
+you will soon enough: you can stay in _any_ position." It had been as
+the murmurous consecration to follow the murmurous welcome; and even if
+it were but part of Aunt Maud's own spiritual ebriety--for the dear
+woman, one could see, was spiritually "keeping" the day--it served to
+Milly, then and afterwards, as a high-water mark of the imagination.
+
+It was to be the end of the short parenthesis which had begun but the
+other day at Lancaster Gate with Lord Mark's informing her that she was
+a "success"--the key thus again struck; and though no distinct, no
+numbered revelations had crowded in, there had, as we have seen, been
+plenty of incident for the space and the time. There had been thrice as
+much, and all gratuitous and genial--if, in portions, not exactly
+hitherto _the_ revelation--as three unprepared weeks could have been
+expected to produce. Mrs. Lowder had improvised a "rush" for them, but
+out of elements, as Milly was now a little more freely aware, somewhat
+roughly combined. Therefore if at this very instant she had her reasons
+for thinking of the parenthesis as about to close--reasons completely
+personal--she had on behalf of her companion a divination almost as
+deep. The parenthesis would close with this admirable picture, but the
+admirable picture still would show Aunt Maud as not absolutely sure
+either if she herself were destined to remain in it. What she was
+doing, Milly might even not have escaped seeming to see, was to talk
+herself into a sublimer serenity while she ostensibly talked Milly. It
+was fine, the girl fully felt, the way she did talk _her,_ little as,
+at bottom, our young woman needed it or found other persuasions at
+fault. It was in particular during the minutes of her grateful
+absorption of iced coffee--qualified by a sharp doubt of her
+wisdom--that she most had in view Lord Mark's relation to her being
+there, or at least to the question of her being amused at it. It
+wouldn't have taken much by the end of five minutes quite to make her
+feel that this relation was charming. It might, once more, simply have
+been that everything, anything, was charming when one was so justly and
+completely charmed; but, frankly, she had not supposed anything so
+serenely sociable could define itself between them as the friendly
+understanding that was at present somehow in the air. They were, many
+of them together, near the marquee that had been erected on a stretch
+of sward as a temple of refreshment and that happened to have the
+property--which was all to the good of making Milly think of a
+"durbar"; her iced coffee had been a consequence of this connection, in
+which, further, the bright company scattered about fell thoroughly into
+place. Certain of its members might have represented the contingent of
+"native princes"--familiar, but scarce the less grandly gregarious
+term!--and Lord Mark would have done for one of these even though for
+choice he but presented himself as a supervisory friend of the family.
+The Lancaster Gate family, he clearly intended, in which he included
+its American recruits, and included above all Kate Croy--a young person
+blessedly easy to take care of. She knew people, and people knew her,
+and she was the handsomest thing there--this last a declaration made by
+Milly, in a sort of soft mid-summer madness, a straight skylark-flight
+of charity, to Aunt Maud.
+
+Kate had, for her new friend's eyes, the extraordinary and attaching
+property of appearing at a given moment to show as a beautiful
+stranger, to cut her connections and lose her identity, letting the
+imagination for the time make what it would of them--make her merely a
+person striking from afar, more and more pleasing as one watched, but
+who was above all a subject for curiosity. Nothing could have given
+her, as a party to a relation, a greater freshness than this
+sense--which sprang up at its own hours--of being as curious about her
+as if one hadn't known her. It had sprung up, we have gathered, as soon
+as Milly had seen her after hearing from Mrs. Stringham of her
+knowledge of Merton Densher; she had _looked_ then other and, as Milly
+knew the real critical mind would call it, more objective; and our
+young woman had foreseen it of her, on the spot, that she would often
+look so again. It was exactly what she was doing this afternoon; and
+Milly, who had amusements of thought that were like the secrecies of a
+little girl playing with dolls when conventionally "too big," could
+almost settle to the game of what one would suppose her, how one would
+place her, if one didn't know her. She became thus, intermittently, a
+figure conditioned only by the great facts of aspect, a figure to be
+waited for, named and fitted. This was doubtless but a way of feeling
+that it was of her essence to be peculiarly what the occasion, whatever
+it might be, demanded when its demand was highest. There were probably
+ways enough, on these lines, for such a consciousness; another of them
+would be, for instance, to say that she was made for great social uses.
+Milly was not wholly sure that she herself knew what great social uses
+might be--unless, as a good example, exerting just that sort of glamour
+in just that sort of frame were one of them: she would have fallen back
+on knowing sufficiently that they existed at all events for her friend.
+It imputed a primness, all round, to be reduced but to saying, by way
+of a translation of one's amusement, that she was always so
+_right_--since that, too often, was what the _insupportables_
+themselves were; yet it was, in overflow to Aunt Maud, what she had to
+content herself withal--save for the lame enhancement of saying she was
+lovely. It served, all the same, the purpose, strengthened the bond
+that for the time held the two ladies together, distilled in short its
+drop of rose-colour for Mrs. Lowder's own view. That was really the
+view Milly had, for most of the rest of the occasion, to give herself
+to immediately taking in; but it didn't prevent the continued play of
+those swift cross-lights, odd beguilements of the mind, at which we
+have already glanced.
+
+Mrs. Lowder herself found it enough simply to reply, in respect to
+Kate, that she was indeed a luxury to take about the world: she
+expressed no more surprise than that at her "rightness" to-day. Wasn't
+it by this time sufficiently manifest that it was precisely as the very
+luxury she was proving that she had, from far back, been appraised and
+waited for? Crude elation, however, might be kept at bay, and the
+circumstance none the less demonstrated that they were all swimming
+together in the blue. It came back to Lord Mark again, as he seemed
+slowly to pass and repass and conveniently to linger before them; he
+was personally the note of the blue--like a suspended skein of silk
+within reach of the broiderer's hand. Aunt Maud's free-moving shuttle
+took a length of him at rhythmic intervals; and one of the intermixed
+truths that flickered across to Milly was that he ever so consentingly
+knew he was being worked in. This was almost like an understanding with
+her at Mrs. Lowder's expense, which she would have none of; she
+wouldn't for the world have had him make any such point as that he
+wouldn't have launched them at Matcham--or whatever it was he _had_
+done--only for Aunt Maud's _beaux yeux._ What he had done, it would
+have been guessable, was something he had for some time been desired in
+vain to do; and what they were all now profiting by was a change
+comparatively sudden, the cessation of hope delayed. What had caused
+the cessation easily showed itself as none of Milly's business; and she
+was luckily, for that matter, in no real danger of hearing from him
+directly that her individual weight had been felt in the scale. Why
+then indeed was it an effect of his diffused but subdued participation
+that he might absolutely have been saying to her "Yes, let the dear
+woman take her own tone? Since she's here she may stay," he might have
+been adding--"for whatever she can make of it. But you and I are
+different." Milly knew _she_ was different in truth--his own difference
+was his own affair; but also she knew that, after all, even at their
+distinctest, Lord Mark's "tips" in this line would be tacit. He
+practically placed her--it came round again to that--under no
+obligation whatever. It was a matter of equal ease, moreover, her
+letting Mrs. Lowder take a tone. She might have taken twenty--they
+would have spoiled nothing.
+
+"You must stay on with us; you _can,_ you know, in any position you
+like; any, any, _any,_ my dear child"--and her emphasis went deep. "You
+must make your home with us; and it's really open to you to make the
+most beautiful one in the world. You mustn't be under a mistake--under
+any of any sort; and you must let us all think for you a little, take
+care of you and watch over you. Above all you must help me with Kate,
+and you must stay a little _for_ her; nothing for a long time has
+happened to me so good as that you and she should have become friends.
+It's beautiful; it's great; it's everything. What makes it perfect is
+that it should have come about through our dear delightful Susie,
+restored to me, after so many years, by such a miracle. No--that's more
+charming to me than even your hitting it off with Kate. God has been
+good to one--positively; for I couldn't, at my age, have made a new
+friend--undertaken, I mean, out of whole cloth, the real thing. It's
+like changing one's bankers--after fifty: one doesn't do that. That's
+why Susie has been kept for me, as you seem to keep people in your
+wonderful country, in lavender and pink paper--coming back at last as
+straight as out of a fairy-tale and with you as an attendant fairy."
+Milly hereupon replied appreciatively that such a description of
+herself made her feel as if pink paper were her dress and lavender its
+trimming; but Aunt Maud was not to be deterred by a weak joke from
+keeping it up. Her interlocutress could feel besides that she kept it
+up in perfect sincerity. She was somehow at this hour a very happy
+woman, and a part of her happiness might precisely have been that her
+affections and her views were moving as never before in concert.
+Unquestionably she loved Susie; but she also loved Kate and loved Lord
+Mark, loved their funny old host and hostess, loved every one within
+range, down to the very servant who came to receive Milly's empty
+iceplate--down, for that matter, to Milly herself, who was, while she
+talked, really conscious of the enveloping flap of a protective mantle,
+a shelter with the weight of an eastern carpet. An eastern carpet, for
+wishing-purposes of one's own, was a thing to be on rather than under;
+still, however, if the girl should fail of breath it wouldn't be, she
+could feel, by Mrs. Lowder's fault. One of the last things she was
+afterwards to recall of this was Aunt Maud's going on to say that she
+and Kate must stand together because together they could do anything.
+It was for Kate of course she was essentially planning; but the plan,
+enlarged and uplifted now, somehow required Milly's prosperity too for
+its full operation, just as Milly's prosperity at the same time
+involved Kate's. It was nebulous yet, it was slightly confused, but it
+was unmistakably free and genial, and it made our young woman
+understand things Kate had said of her aunt's possibilities as well as
+characterisations that had fallen from Susan Shepherd. One of the most
+frequent on the lips of the latter had been that dear Maud was a
+natural force.
+
+
+XI
+
+A prime reason, we must add, why sundry impressions were not to be
+fully present to the girl till later on was that they yielded at this
+stage, with an effect of sharp supersession, to a detached quarter of
+an hour--her only one--with Lord Mark. "Have you seen the picture in
+the house, the beautiful one that's so like you?"--he was asking that
+as he stood before her; having come up at last with his smooth
+intimation that any wire he had pulled and yet wanted not to remind her
+of wasn't quite a reason for his having no joy at all.
+
+"I've been through rooms and I've seen pictures. But if I'm 'like'
+anything so beautiful as most of them seemed to me----!" It needed in
+short for Milly some evidence, which he only wanted to supply. She was
+the image of the wonderful Bronzino, which she must have a look at on
+every ground. He had thus called her off and led her away; the more
+easily that the house within was above all what had already drawn round
+her its mystic circle. Their progress, meanwhile, was not of the
+straightest; it was an advance, without haste, through innumerable
+natural pauses and soft concussions, determined for the most part by
+the appearance before them of ladies and gentlemen, singly, in couples,
+in groups, who brought them to a stand with an inveterate "I say,
+Mark." What they said she never quite made out; it was their all so
+domestically knowing him, and his knowing them, that mainly struck her,
+while her impression, for the rest, was but of fellow-strollers more
+vaguely afloat than themselves, supernumeraries mostly a little
+battered, whether as jaunty males or as ostensibly elegant women. They
+might have been moving a good deal by a momentum that had begun far
+back, but they were still brave and personable, still warranted for
+continuance as long again, and they gave her, in especial collectively,
+a sense of pleasant voices, pleasanter than those of actors, of
+friendly, empty words and kind, lingering eyes. The lingering eyes
+looked her over, the lingering eyes were what went, in almost confessed
+simplicity, with the pointless "I say, Mark "; and what was really most
+sensible of all was that, as a pleasant matter of course, if she didn't
+mind, he seemed to suggest their letting people, poor dear things, have
+the benefit of her.
+
+The odd part was that he made her herself believe, for amusement, in
+the benefit, measured by him in mere manner--for wonderful, of a truth,
+was, as a means of expression, his slightness of emphasis--that her
+present good-nature conferred. It was, as she could easily see, a mild
+common carnival of good-nature--a mass of London people together, of
+sorts and sorts, but who mainly knew each other and who, in their way,
+did, no doubt, confess to curiosity. It had gone round that she was
+there; questions about her would be passing; the easiest thing was to
+run the gauntlet with _him_--just as the easiest thing was in fact to
+trust him generally. Couldn't she know for herself, passively, how
+little harm they meant her?--to that extent that it made no difference
+whether or not he introduced them. The strangest thing of all for Milly
+was perhaps the uplifted assurance and indifference with which she
+could simply give back the particular bland stare that appeared in such
+cases to mark civilisation at its highest. It was so little her fault,
+this oddity of what had "gone round" about her, that to accept it
+without question might be as good a way as another of feeling life. It
+was inevitable to supply the probable description--that of the awfully
+rich young American who was so queer to behold, but nice, by all
+accounts, to know; and she had really but one instant of speculation as
+to fables or fantasies perchance originally launched. She asked herself
+once only if Susie could, inconceivably, have been blatant about her;
+for the question, on the spot, was really blown away for ever. She knew
+in fact on the spot and with sharpness just why she had "elected" Susan
+Shepherd: she had had from the first hour the conviction of her being
+precisely the person in the world least possibly a trumpeter. So it
+wasn't their fault, it wasn't their fault, and anything might happen
+that would, and everything now again melted together, and kind eyes
+were always kind eyes--if it were never to be worse than that! She got
+with her companion into the house; they brushed, beneficently, past all
+their accidents. The Bronzino was, it appeared, deep within, and the
+long afternoon light lingered for them on patches of old colour and
+waylaid them, as they went, in nooks and opening vistas.
+
+It was all the while for Milly as if Lord Mark had really had something
+other than this spoken pretext in view; as if there were something he
+wanted to say to her and were only--consciously yet not awkwardly, just
+delicately--hanging fire. At the same time it was as if the thing had
+practically been said by the moment they came in sight of the picture;
+since what it appeared to amount to was "Do let a fellow who isn't a
+fool take care of you a little." The thing somehow, with the aid of the
+Bronzino, was done; it hadn't seemed to matter to her before if he were
+a fool or no; but now, just where they were, she liked his not being;
+and it was all moreover none the worse for coming back to something of
+the same sound as Mrs. Lowder's so recent reminder. She too wished to
+take care of her--and wasn't it, _a peu pres_ what all the people with
+the kind eyes were wishing? Once more things melted together--the
+beauty and the history and the facility and the splendid midsummer
+glow: it was a sort of magnificent maximum, the pink dawn of an
+apotheosis, coming so curiously soon. What in fact befell was that, as
+she afterwards made out, it was Lord Mark who said nothing in
+particular--it was she herself who said all. She couldn't help that--it
+came; and the reason it came was that she found herself, for the first
+moment, looking at the mysterious portrait through tears. Perhaps it
+was her tears that made it just then so strange and fair--as wonderful
+as he had said: the face of a young woman, all magnificently drawn,
+down to the hands, and magnificently dressed; a face almost livid in
+hue, yet handsome in sadness and crowned with a mass of hair rolled
+back and high, that must, before fading with time, have had a family
+resemblance to her own. The lady in question, at all events, with her
+slightly Michaelangelesque squareness, her eyes of other days, her full
+lips, her long neck, her recorded jewels, her brocaded and wasted reds,
+was a very great personage--only unaccompanied by a joy. 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."
+
+He hadn't understood. She was before the picture, but she had turned to
+him, and she didn't care if, for the minute, he noticed her tears. It
+was probably as good a moment as she should ever have with him. It was
+perhaps as good a moment as she should have with any one, or have in
+any connection whatever. "I mean that everything this afternoon has
+been too beautiful, and that perhaps everything together will never be
+so right again. I'm very glad therefore you've been a part of it."
+
+Though he still didn't understand her he was as nice as if he had; he
+didn't ask for insistence, and that was just a part of his looking
+after her. He simply protected her now from herself, and there was a
+world of practice in it. "Oh, we must talk about these things!"
+
+Ah, they had already done that, she knew, as much as she ever would;
+and she was shaking her head at her pale sister the next moment with a
+world, on her side, of slowness. "I wish I could see the resemblance.
+Of course her complexion's green," she laughed; "but mine's several
+shades greener."
+
+"It's down to the very hands," said Lord Mark.
+
+"Her hands are large," Milly went on, "but mine are larger. Mine are
+huge."
+
+"Oh, you go her, all round, 'one better'--which is just what I said.
+But you're a pair. You must surely catch it," he added as if it were
+important to his character as a serious man not to appear to have
+invented his plea.
+
+"I don't know one never knows one's self. It's a funny fancy, and I
+don't imagine it would have occurred----"
+
+"I see it _has_ occurred"--he has already taken her up. She had her
+back, as she faced the picture, to one of the doors of the room, which
+was open, and on her turning, as he spoke, she saw that they were in
+the presence of three other persons, also, as appeared, interested
+inquirers. Kate Croy was one of these; Lord Mark had just become aware
+of her, and she, all arrested, had immediately seen, and made the best
+of it, that she was far from being first in the field. She had brought
+a lady and a gentleman to whom she wished to show what Lord Mark was
+showing Milly, and he took her straightway as a reinforcement. Kate
+herself had spoken, however, before he had had time to tell her so.
+
+_"You_ had noticed too?"--she smiled at him without looking at Milly.
+"Then I'm not original--which one always hopes one has been. But the
+likeness is so great." And now she looked at Milly--for whom again it
+was, all round indeed, kind, kind eyes. "Yes, there you are, my dear,
+if you want to know. And you're superb." She took now but a glance at
+the picture, though it was enough to make her question to her friends
+not too straight. "Isn't she superb?"
+
+"I brought Miss Theale," Lord Mark explained to the latter, "quite off
+my own bat."
+
+"I wanted Lady Aldershaw," Kate continued to Milly, "to see for
+herself."
+
+_"Les grands esprits se rencontrent!"_ laughed her attendant gentleman,
+a high, but slightly stooping, shambling and wavering person, who
+represented urbanity by the liberal aid of certain prominent front
+teeth and whom Milly vaguely took for some sort of great man.
+
+Lady Aldershaw meanwhile looked at Milly quite as if Milly had been the
+Bronzino and the Bronzino only Milly. "Superb, superb. Of course I had
+noticed you. It is wonderful," she went on with her back to the
+picture, but with some other eagerness which Milly felt gathering,
+directing her motions now. It was enough--they were introduced, and she
+was saying "I wonder if you could give us the pleasure of coming----"
+She was not fresh, for she was not young, even though she denied at
+every pore that she was old; but she was vivid and much bejewelled for
+the midsummer daylight; and she was all in the palest pinks and blues.
+She didn't think, at this pass, that she could "come" anywhere--Milly
+didn't; and she already knew that somehow Lord Mark was saving her from
+the question. He had interposed, taking the words out of the lady's
+mouth and not caring at all if the lady minded. That was clearly the
+right way to treat her--at least for him; as she had only dropped,
+smiling, and then turned away with him. She had been dealt with--it
+would have done an enemy good. The gentleman still stood, a little
+helpless, addressing himself to the intention of urbanity as if it were
+a large loud whistle; he had been signing sympathy, in his way, while
+the lady made her overture; and Milly had, in this light, soon arrived
+at their identity. They were Lord and Lady Aldershaw, and the wife was
+the clever one. A minute or two later the situation had changed, and
+she knew it afterwards to have been by the subtle operation of Kate.
+She was herself saying that she was afraid she must go now if Susie
+could be found; but she was sitting down on the nearest seat to say it.
+The prospect, through opened doors, stretched before her into other
+rooms, down the vista of which Lord Mark was strolling with Lady
+Aldershaw, who, close to him and much intent, seemed to show from
+behind as peculiarly expert. Lord Aldershaw, for his part, had been
+left in the middle of the room, while Kate, with her back to him, was
+standing before her with much sweetness of manner. The sweetness was
+all for _her;_ she had the sense of the poor gentleman's having somehow
+been handled as Lord Mark had handled his wife. He dangled there, he
+shambled a little; then he bethought himself of the Bronzino, before
+which, with his eyeglass, he hovered. It drew from him an odd, vague
+sound, not wholly distinct from a grunt, and a "Humph--most
+remarkable!" which lighted Kate's face with amusement. The next moment
+he had creaked away, over polished floors, after the others, and Milly
+was feeling as if _she_ had been rude. But Lord Aldershaw was in every
+way a detail, and Kate was saying to her that she hoped she wasn't ill.
+
+Thus it was that, aloft there in the great gilded historic chamber and
+the presence of the pale personage on the wall, whose eyes all the
+while seemed engaged with her own, she found herself suddenly sunk in
+something quite intimate and humble and to which these grandeurs were
+strange enough witnesses. It had come up, in the form in which she had
+had to accept it, all suddenly, and nothing about it, at the same time,
+was more marked than that she had in a manner plunged into it to escape
+from something else. Something else, from her first vision of her
+friend's appearance three minutes before, had been present to her even
+through the call made by the others on her attention; something that
+was perversely _there,_ she was more and more uncomfortably finding, at
+least for the first moments and by some spring of its own, with every
+renewal of their meeting. "Is it the way she looks to _him?"_ she asked
+herself--the perversity being that she kept in remembrance that Kate
+was known to him. It wasn't a fault in Kate--nor in him assuredly; and
+she had a horror, being generous and tender, of treating either of them
+as if it had been. To Densher himself she couldn't make it up--he was
+too far away; but her secondary impulse was to make it up to Kate. She
+did so now with a strange soft energy--the impulse immediately acting.
+"Will you render me to-morrow a great service?"
+
+"Any service, dear child, in the world."
+
+"But it's a secret one--nobody must know. I must be wicked and false
+about it."
+
+"Then I'm your woman," Kate smiled, "for that's the kind of thing I
+love. _Do_ let us do something bad. You're impossibly without sin, you
+know."
+
+Milly's eyes, on this, remained a little with their companion's. "Ah, I
+shan't perhaps come up to your idea. It's only to deceive Susan
+Shepherd."
+
+"Oh!" said Kate as if this were indeed mild.
+
+"But thoroughly--as thoroughly as I can."
+
+"And for cheating," Kate asked, "my powers will contribute? Well, I'll
+do my best for you." In accordance with which it was presently settled
+between them that Milly should have the aid and comfort of her presence
+for a visit to Sir Luke Strett. Kate had needed a minute for
+enlightenment, and it was quite grand for her comrade that this name
+should have said nothing to her. To Milly herself it had for some days
+been secretly saying much. The personage in question was, as she
+explained, the greatest of medical lights if she had got hold, as she
+believed (and she had used to this end the wisdom of the serpent) of
+the right, the special man. She had written to him three days before,
+and he had named her an hour, eleven-twenty; only it had come to her,
+on the eve, that she couldn't go alone. Her maid, on the other hand,
+wasn't good enough, and Susie was too good. Kate had listened, above
+all, with high indulgence. "And I'm betwixt and between, happy thought!
+Too good for what?"
+
+Milly thought. "Why, to be worried if it's nothing. And to be still
+more worried--I mean before she need be--if it isn't."
+
+Kate fixed her with deep eyes. "What in the world is the matter with
+you?" It had inevitably a sound of impatience, as if it had been a
+challenge really to produce something; so that Milly felt her for the
+moment only as a much older person, standing above her a little,
+doubting the imagined ailments, suspecting the easy complaints, of
+ignorant youth. It somewhat checked her, further, that the matter with
+her was what exactly as yet she wanted knowledge about; and she
+immediately declared, for conciliation, that if she were merely
+fanciful Kate would see her put to shame. Kate vividly uttered, in
+return, the hope that, since she could come out and be so charming,
+could so universally dazzle and interest, she wasn't all the while in
+distress or in anxiety--didn't believe herself, in short, to be in any
+degree seriously menaced. "Well, I want to make out--to make out!" was
+all that this consistently produced. To which Kate made clear answer:
+"Ah then, let us by all means!"
+
+"I thought," Milly said, "you would like to help me. But I must ask
+you, please, for the promise of absolute silence."
+
+"And how, if you _are_ ill, can your friends remain in ignorance?"
+
+"Well, if I am, it must of course finally come out. But I can go for a
+long time." Milly spoke with her eyes again on her painted
+sister's--almost as if under their suggestion. She still sat there
+before Kate, yet not without a light in her face. "That will be one of
+my advantages. I think I could die without its being noticed."
+
+"You're an extraordinary young woman," her friend, visibly held by her,
+declared at last. "What a remarkable time to talk of such things!"
+
+"Well, we won't talk, precisely"--Milly got herself together again. "I
+only wanted to make sure of you."
+
+"Here in the midst of----!" But Kate could only sigh for wonder--almost
+visibly too for pity.
+
+It made a moment during which her companion waited on her word; partly
+as if from a yearning, shy but deep, to have her case put to her just
+as Kate was struck by it; partly as if the hint of pity were already
+giving a sense to her whimsical "shot," with Lord Mark, at Mrs.
+Lowder's first dinner. Exactly this--the handsome girl's compassionate
+manner, her friendly descent from her own strength--was what she had
+then foretold. She took Kate up as if positively for the deeper taste
+of it. "Here in the midst of what?"
+
+"Of everything. There's nothing you can't have. There's nothing you
+can't do."
+
+"So Mrs. Lowder tells me."
+
+It just kept Kate's eyes fixed as possibly for more of that; then,
+however, without waiting, she went on. "We all adore you."
+
+"You're wonderful--you dear things!" Milly laughed.
+
+"No, it's _you."_ And Kate seemed struck with the real interest of it.
+"In three weeks!"
+
+Milly kept it up. "Never were people on such terms! All the more
+reason," she added, "that I shouldn't needlessly torment you."
+
+"But me? what becomes of _me?"_ said Kate.
+
+"Well, you--" Milly thought--"if there's anything to bear, you'll bear
+it."
+
+"But I _won't_ bear it!" said Kate Croy.
+
+"Oh yes, you will: all the same! You'll pity me awfully, but you'll
+help me very much. And I absolutely trust you. So there we are." There
+they were, then, since Kate had so to take it; but there, Milly felt,
+she herself in particular was; for it was just the point at which she
+had wished to arrive. She had wanted to prove to herself that she
+didn't horribly blame her friend for any reserve; and what better proof
+could there be than this quite special confidence? If she desired to
+show Kate that she really believed the latter liked her, how could she
+show it more than by asking her for help?
+
+
+XII
+
+What it really came to, on the morrow, this first time--the time Kate
+went with her--was that the great man had, a little, to excuse himself;
+had, by a rare accident--for he kept his consulting-hours in general
+rigorously free--but ten minutes to give her; ten mere minutes which he
+yet placed at her service in a manner that she admired even more than
+she could meet it: so crystal-clean the great empty cup of attention
+that he set between them on the table. He was presently to jump into
+his carriage, but he promptly made the point that he must see her
+again, see her within a day or two; and he named for her at once
+another hour--easing her off beautifully too even then in respect to
+her possibly failing of justice to her errand. The minutes affected her
+in fact as ebbing more swiftly than her little army of items could
+muster, and they would probably have gone without her doing much more
+than secure another hearing, had it not been for her sense, at the
+last, that she had gained above all an impression. The impression--all
+the sharp growth of the final few moments--was neither more nor less
+than that she might make, of a sudden, in quite another world, another
+straight friend, and a friend who would moreover be, wonderfully, the
+most appointed, the most thoroughly adjusted of the whole collection,
+inasmuch as he would somehow wear the character scientifically,
+ponderably, proveably--not just loosely and sociably. Literally,
+furthermore, it wouldn't really depend on herself, Sir Luke Strett's
+friendship, in the least; perhaps what made her most stammer and pant
+was its thus queerly coming over her that she might find she had
+interested him even beyond her intention, find she was in fact launched
+in some current that would lose itself in the sea of science. At the
+same time that she struggled, however, she also surrendered; there was
+a moment at which she almost dropped the form of stating, of
+explaining, and threw herself, without violence, only with a supreme
+pointless quaver that had turned, the next instant, to an intensity of
+interrogative stillness, upon his general goodwill. His large, settled
+face, though firm, was not, as she had thought at first, hard; he
+looked, in the oddest manner, to her fancy, half like a general and
+half like a bishop, and she was soon sure that, within some such
+handsome range, what it would show her would be what was good, what was
+best for her. She had established, in other words, in this time-saving
+way, a relation with it; and the relation was the special trophy that,
+for the hour, she bore off. It was like an absolute possession, a new
+resource altogether, something done up in the softest silk and tucked
+away under the arm of memory. She hadn't had it when she went in, and
+she had it when she came out; she had it there under her cloak, but
+dissimulated, invisibly carried, when smiling, smiling, she again faced
+Kate Croy. That young lady had of course awaited her in another room,
+where, as the great man was to absent himself, no one else was in
+attendance; and she rose for her with such a face of sympathy as might
+have graced the vestibule of a dentist. "Is it out?" she seemed to ask
+as if it had been a question of a tooth; and Milly indeed kept her in
+no suspense at all.
+
+"He's a dear. I'm to come again."
+
+"But what does he say?"
+
+Milly was almost gay. "That I'm not to worry about anything in the
+world, and that if I'll be a good girl and do exactly what he tells me,
+he'll take care of me for ever and ever."
+
+Kate wondered as if things scarce fitted. "But does he allow then that
+you're ill?"
+
+"I don't know what he allows, and I don't care. I shall know, and
+whatever it is it will be enough. He knows all about me, and I like it.
+I don't hate it a bit."
+
+Still, however, Kate stared. "But could he, in so few minutes, ask you
+enough----?"
+
+"He asked me scarcely anything--he doesn't need to do anything so
+stupid," Milly said. "He can tell. He knows," she repeated; "and when I
+go back--for he'll have thought me over a little--it will be all right."
+
+Kate, after a moment, made the best of this. "Then when are we to come?"
+
+It just pulled her friend up, for even while they talked--at least it
+was one of the reasons--she stood there suddenly, irrelevantly, in the
+light of her _other_ identity, the identity she would have for Mr.
+Densher. This was always, from one instant to another, an incalculable
+light, which, though it might go off faster than it came on,
+necessarily disturbed. It sprang, with a perversity all its own, from
+the fact that, with the lapse of hours and days, the chances themselves
+that made for his being named continued so oddly to fail. There were
+twenty, there were fifty, but none of them turned up. This, in
+particular, was of course not a juncture at which the least of them
+would naturally be present; but it would make, none the less, Milly
+saw, another day practically all stamped with avoidance. She saw in a
+quick glimmer, and with it all Kate's unconsciousness; and then she
+shook off the obsession. But it had lasted long enough to qualify her
+response. No, she had shown Kate how she trusted her; and that, for
+loyalty, would somehow do. "Oh, dear thing, now that the ice is broken
+I shan't trouble _you_ again."
+
+"You'll come alone?"
+
+"Without a scruple. Only I shall ask you, please, for your absolute
+discretion still."
+
+Outside, before the door, on the wide pavement of the great square,
+they had to wait again while their carriage, which Milly had kept,
+completed a further turn of exercise, engaged in by the coachman for
+reasons of his own. The footman was there, and had indicated that he
+was making the circuit; so Kate went on while they stood. "But don't
+you ask a good deal, darling, in proportion to what you give?"
+
+This pulled Milly up still shorter--so short in fact that she yielded
+as soon as she had taken it in. But she continued to smile. "I see.
+Then you _can_ tell."
+
+"I don't want to 'tell,'" said Kate. "I'll be as silent as the tomb if
+I can only have the truth from you. All I want is that you shouldn't
+keep from me how you find out that you really are."
+
+"Well then, I won't, ever. But you see for yourself," Milly went on,
+"how I really am. I'm satisfied. I'm happy."
+
+Kate looked at her long. "I believe you like it. The way things turn
+out for you----!"
+
+Milly met her look now without a thought of anything but the spoken.
+She had ceased to be Mr. Densher's image; she was all her own memento
+and she was none the less fine. Still, still, what had passed was a
+fair bargain, and it would do. "Of course I like it. I feel--I can't
+otherwise describe it--as if I had been, on my knees, to the priest.
+I've confessed and I've been absolved. It has been lifted off."
+
+Kate's eyes never quitted her. "He must have liked _you."_
+
+"Oh--doctors!" Milly said. "But I hope," she added, "he didn't like me
+too much." Then as if to escape a little from her friend's deeper
+sounding, or as impatient for the carriage, not yet in sight, her eyes,
+turning away, took in the great stale square. As its staleness,
+however, was but that of London fairly fatigued, the late hot London
+with its dance all danced and its story all told, the air seemed a
+thing of blurred pictures and mixed echoes, and an impression met the
+sense--an impression that broke, the next moment, through the girl's
+tightened lips. "Oh, it's a beautiful big world, and everyone, yes,
+everyone----!" It presently brought her back to Kate, and she hoped she
+didn't actually look as much as if she were crying as she must have
+looked to Lord Mark among the portraits at Matcham.
+
+Kate at all events understood. "Everyone wants to be so nice?"
+
+"So nice," said the grateful Milly.
+
+"Oh," Kate laughed, "we'll pull you through! And won't you now bring
+Mrs. Stringham?"
+
+But Milly after an instant was again clear about that. "Not till I've
+seen him once more."
+
+She was to have found this preference, two days later, abundantly
+justified; and yet when, in prompt accordance with what had passed
+between them, she reappeared before her distinguished friend--that
+character having, for him, in the interval, built itself up still
+higher--the first thing he asked her was whether she had been
+accompanied. She told him, on this, straightway, everything; completely
+free at present from her first embarrassment, disposed even--as she
+felt she might become--to undue volubility, and conscious moreover of
+no alarm from his thus perhaps wishing that she had not come alone. It
+was exactly as if, in the forty-eight hours that had passed, her
+acquaintance with him had somehow increased, and his own knowledge in
+particular received mysterious additions. They had been together,
+before, scarce ten minutes; but the relation, the one the ten minutes
+had so beautifully created, was there to take straight up: and this
+not, on his own part, from mere professional heartiness, mere bedside
+manner, which she would have disliked--much rather from a quiet,
+pleasant air in him of having positively asked about her, asked here
+and there and found out. Of course he couldn't in the least have asked,
+or have wanted to; there was no source of information to his hand, and
+he had really needed none: he had found out simply by his genius--and
+found out, she meant, literally everything. Now she knew not only that
+she didn't dislike this--the state of being found out about; but that,
+on the contrary, it was truly what she had come for, and that, for the
+time at least, it would give her something firm to stand on. She struck
+herself as aware, aware as she had never been, of really not having had
+from the beginning anything firm. It would be strange for the firmness
+to come, after all, from her learning in these agreeable conditions
+that she was in some way doomed; but above all it would prove how
+little she had hitherto had to hold her up. If she was now to be held
+up by the mere process--since that was perhaps on the cards--of being
+let down, this would only testify in turn to her queer little history.
+_That_ sense of loosely rattling had been no process at all; and it was
+ridiculously true that her thus sitting there to see her life put into
+the scales represented her first approach to the taste of orderly
+living. Such was Milly's romantic version--that her life, especially by
+the fact of this second interview, _was_ put into the scales; and just
+the best part of the relation established might have been, for that
+matter, that the great grave charming man knew, had known at once, that
+it was romantic, and in that measure allowed for it. Her only doubt,
+her only fear, was whether he perhaps wouldn't even take advantage of
+her being a little romantic to treat her as romantic altogether. This
+doubtless was her danger with him; but she should see, and dangers in
+general meanwhile dropped and dropped.
+
+The very place, at the end of a few minutes, the commodious, "handsome"
+room, far back in the fine old house, soundless from position, somewhat
+sallow with years of celebrity, somewhat sombre even at midsummer--the
+very place put on for her a look of custom and use, squared itself
+solidly round her as with promises and certainties. She had come forth
+to see the world, and this then was to be the world's light, the rich
+dusk of a London "back," these the world's walls, those the world's
+curtains and carpet. She should be intimate with the great bronze clock
+and mantel-ornaments, conspicuously presented in gratitude and long
+ago; she should be as one of the circle of eminent contemporaries,
+photographed, engraved, signatured, and in particular framed and
+glazed, who made up the rest of the decoration, and made up as well so
+much of the human comfort; and while she thought of all the clean
+truths, unfringed, unfingered, that the listening stillness, strained
+into pauses and waits, would again and again, for years, have kept
+distinct, she also wondered what she would eventually decide upon to
+present in gratitude. She would give something better at least than the
+brawny Victorian bronzes. This was precisely an instance of what she
+felt he knew of her before he had done with her: that she was secretly
+romancing at that rate, in the midst of so much else that was more
+urgent, all over the place. So much for her secrets with him, none of
+which really required to be phrased. It would have been, for example, a
+secret for her from any one else that without a dear lady she had
+picked up just before coming over she wouldn't have a decently near
+connection, of any sort, for such an appeal as she was making, to put
+forward: no one in the least, as it were, to produce for
+respectability. But _his_ seeing it she didn't mind a scrap, and not a
+scrap either his knowing how she had left the dear lady in the dark.
+She had come alone, putting her friend off with a fraud: giving a
+pretext of shops, of a whim, of she didn't know what--the amusement of
+being for once in the streets by herself. The streets by herself were
+new to her--she had always had in them a companion, or a maid; and he
+was never to believe, moreover, that she couldn't take full in the face
+anything he might have to say. He was softly amused at her account of
+her courage; though he yet showed it somehow without soothing her too
+grossly. Still, he did want to know whom she had. Hadn't there been a
+lady with her on Wednesday?
+
+"Yes--a different one. Not the one who's travelling with me. I've told
+_her."_
+
+Distinctly he was amused, and it added to his air--the greatest charm
+of all--of giving her lots of time. "You've told her what?"
+
+"Well," said Milly, "that I visit you in secret."
+
+"And how many persons will she tell?"
+
+"Oh, she's devoted. Not one."
+
+"Well, if she's devoted doesn't that make another friend for you?"
+
+It didn't take much computation, but she nevertheless had to think a
+moment, conscious as she was that he distinctly _would_ want to fill
+out his notion of her--even a little, as it were, to warm the air for
+her. That, however--and better early than late--he must accept as of no
+use; and she herself felt for an instant quite a competent certainty on
+the subject of any such warming. The air, for Milly Theale, was, from
+the very nature of the case, destined never to rid itself of a
+considerable chill. This she could tell him with authority, if she
+could tell him nothing else; and she seemed to see now, in short, that
+it would importantly simplify. "Yes, it makes another; but they all
+together wouldn't make--well, I don't know what to call it but the
+difference. I mean when one is--really alone. I've never seen anything
+like the kindness." She pulled up a minute while he waited--waited
+again as if with his reasons for letting her, for almost making her,
+talk. What she herself wanted was not, for the third time, to cry, as
+it were, in public. She _had_ never seen anything like the kindness,
+and she wished to do it justice; but she knew what she was about, and
+justice was not wronged by her being able presently to stick to her
+point. "Only one's situation is what it is. It's me it concerns. The
+rest is delightful and useless. Nobody can really help. That's why I'm
+by myself to-day. I _want_ to be--in spite of Miss Croy, who came with
+me last. If you can help, so much the better and also of course if one
+can, a little, one's self. Except for that--you and me doing our
+best--I like you to see me just as I am. Yes, I like it--and I don't
+exaggerate. Shouldn't one, at the start, show the worst--so that
+anything after that may be better? It wouldn't make any real
+difference--it _won't_ make any, anything that may happen won't--to any
+one. Therefore I feel myself, this way, with you, just as I am; and--if
+you do in the least care to know--it quite positively bears me up." She
+put it as to his caring to know, because his manner seemed to give her
+all her chance, and the impression was there for her to take. It was
+strange and deep for her, this impression, and she did, accordingly,
+take it straight home. It showed him--showed him in spite of
+himself--as allowing, somewhere far within, things comparatively
+remote, things in fact quite, as she would have said, outside,
+delicately to weigh with him; showed him as interested, on her behalf,
+in other questions beside the question of what was the matter with her.
+She accepted such an interest as regular in the highest type of
+scientific mind--his _being_ the even highest, magnificently because
+otherwise, obviously, it wouldn't be there; but she could at the same
+time take it as a direct source of light upon herself, even though that
+might present her a little as pretending to equal him. Wanting to know
+more about a patient than how a patient was constructed or deranged
+couldn't be, even on the part of the greatest of doctors, anything but
+some form or other of the desire to let the patient down easily. When
+that was the case the reason, in turn, could only be, too manifestly,
+pity; and when pity held up its tell-tale face like a head on a pike,
+in a French revolution, bobbing before a window, what was the inference
+but that the patient was bad? He might say what he would now--she would
+always have seen the head at the window; and in fact from this moment
+she only wanted him to say what he would. He might say it too with the
+greater ease to himself as there wasn't one of her divinations that--as
+her own--he would in any way put himself out for. Finally, if he was
+making her talk she _was_ talking; and what it could, at any rate, come
+to for him was that she wasn't afraid. If he wanted to do the dearest
+thing in the world for her he would show her he believed she wasn't;
+which undertaking of hers--not to have misled him--was what she counted
+at the moment as her presumptuous little hint to him that she was as
+good as himself. It put forward the bold idea that he could really _be_
+misled; and there actually passed between them for some seconds a sign,
+a sign of the eyes only, that they knew together where they were. This
+made, in their brown old temple of truth, its momentary flicker; then
+what followed it was that he had her, all the same, in his pocket; and
+the whole thing wound up, for that consummation, with its kind dim
+smile. Such kindness was wonderful with such dimness; but
+brightness--that even of sharp steel--was of course for the other side
+of the business, and it would all come in for her in one way or
+another. "Do you mean," he asked, "that you've no relations at
+all?--not a parent, not a sister, not even a cousin nor an aunt?"
+
+She shook her head as with the easy habit of an interviewed heroine or
+a freak of nature at a show. "Nobody whatever." But the last thing she
+had come for was to be dreary about it. "I'm a survivor--a survivor of
+a general wreck. You see," she added, "how that's to be taken into
+account--that everyone else _has_ gone. When I was ten years old there
+were, with my father and my mother, six of us. I'm all that's left. But
+they died," she went on, to be fair all round, "of different things.
+Still, there it is. And, as I told you before, I'm American. Not that I
+mean that makes me worse. However, you'll probably know what it makes
+me."
+
+"Yes," he discreetly indulged her; "I know perfectly what it makes you.
+It makes you, to begin with, a capital case."
+
+She sighed, though gratefully, as if again before the social scene.
+"Ah, there you are!"
+
+"Oh, no; there 'we' aren't at all. There I am only--but as much as you
+like. I've no end of American friends: there _they_ are, if you please,
+and it's a fact that you couldn't very well be in a better place than
+in their company. It puts you with plenty of others--and that isn't
+pure solitude." Then he pursued: "I'm sure you've an excellent spirit;
+but don't try to bear more things than you need." Which after an
+instant he further explained. "Hard things have come to you in youth,
+but you mustn't think life will be for you all hard things. You've the
+right to be happy. You must make up your mind to it. You must accept
+any form in which happiness may come."
+
+"Oh, I'll accept any whatever!" she almost gaily returned. "And it
+seems to me, for that matter, that I'm accepting a new one every day.
+Now _this!"_ she smiled.
+
+"This is very well so far as it goes. You can depend on me," the great
+man said, "for unlimited interest. But I'm only, after all, one element
+in fifty. We must gather in plenty of others. Don't mind who knows.
+Knows, I mean, that you and I are friends."
+
+"Ah, you do want to see some one!" she broke out. "You want to get at
+some one who cares for me." With which, however, as he simply met this
+spontaneity in a manner to show that he had often had it from young
+persons of her race, and that he was familiar even with the
+possibilities of their familiarity, she felt her freedom rendered vain
+by his silence, and she immediately tried to think of the most
+reasonable thing she could say. This would be, precisely, on the
+subject of that freedom, which she now quickly spoke of as complete.
+"That's of course by itself a great boon; so please don't think I don't
+know it. I can do exactly what I like--anything in all the wide world.
+I haven't a creature to ask--there's not a finger to stop me. I can
+shake about till I'm black and blue. That perhaps isn't _all_ joy; but
+lots of people, I know, would like to try it." He had appeared about to
+put a question, but then had let her go on, which she promptly did, for
+she understood him the next moment as having thus taken it from her
+that her means were as great as might be. She had simply given it to
+him so, and this was all that would ever pass between them on the
+odious head. Yet she couldn't help also knowing that an important
+effect, for his judgment, or at least for his amusement--which was his
+feeling, since, marvellously, he did have feeling--was produced by it.
+All her little pieces had now then fallen together for him like the
+morsels of coloured glass that used to make combinations, under the
+hand, in the depths of one of the polygonal peepshows of childhood. "So
+that if it's a question of my doing anything under the sun that will
+help----!"
+
+"You'll _do_ anything under the sun? Good." He took that beautifully,
+ever so pleasantly, for what it was worth; but time was needed--ten
+minutes or so were needed on the spot--to deal even provisionally, with
+the substantive question. It was convenient, in its degree, that there
+was nothing she wouldn't do; but it seemed also highly and agreeably
+vague that she should have to do anything. They thus appeared to be
+taking her, together, for the moment, and almost for sociability, as
+prepared to proceed to gratuitous extremities; the upshot of which was
+in turn, that after much interrogation, auscultation, exploration, much
+noting of his own sequences and neglecting of hers, had duly kept up
+the vagueness, they might have struck themselves, or may at least
+strike us, as coming back from an undeterred but useless voyage to the
+north pole. Milly was ready, under orders, for the north pole; which
+fact was doubtless what made a blinding anticlimax of her friend's
+actual abstention from orders. "No," she heard him again distinctly
+repeat it, "I don't want you for the present to do anything at all;
+anything, that is, but obey a small prescription or two that will be
+made clear to you, and let me within a few days come to see you at
+home."
+
+It was at first heavenly. "Then you'll see Mrs. Stringham." But she
+didn't mind a bit now.
+
+"Well, I shan't be afraid of Mrs. Stringham." And he said it once more
+as she asked once more: "Absolutely not; I 'send' you nowhere.
+England's all right--anywhere that's pleasant, convenient, decent, will
+be all right. You say you can do exactly as you like. Oblige me
+therefore by being so good as to do it. There's only one thing: you
+ought of course, now, as soon as I've seen you again, to get out of
+London."
+
+Milly thought. "May I then go back to the continent?"
+
+"By all means back to the continent. Do go back to the continent."
+
+"Then how will you keep seeing me? But perhaps," she quickly added,
+"you won't want to keep seeing me."
+
+He had it all ready; he had really everything all ready. "I shall
+follow you up; though if you mean that I don't want you to keep seeing
+_me_----"
+
+"Well?" she asked.
+
+It was only just here that he struck her the least bit as stumbling.
+"Well, see all you can. That's what it comes to. Worry about nothing.
+You _have_ at least no worries. It's a great, rare chance."
+
+She had got up, for she had had from him both that he would send her
+something and would advise her promptly of the date of his coming to
+her, by which she was virtually dismissed. Yet, for herself, one or two
+things kept her. "May I come back to England too?"
+
+"Rather! Whenever you like. But always, when you do come, immediately
+let me know."
+
+"Ah," said Milly, "it won't be a great going to and fro."
+
+"Then if you'll stay with us, so much the better."
+
+It touched her, the way he controlled his impatience of her; and the
+fact itself affected her as so precious that she yielded to the wish to
+get more from it. "So you don't think I'm out of my mind?"
+
+"Perhaps that _is,"_ he smiled, "all that's the matter."
+
+She looked at him longer. "No, that's too good. Shall I, at any rate,
+suffer?"
+
+"Not a bit."
+
+"And yet then live?"
+
+"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?"
+
+
+XIII
+
+She had gone out with these last words so in her ears that when once
+she was well away--back this time in the great square alone--it was as
+if some instant application of them had opened out there before her. It
+was positively, this effect, an excitement that carried her on; she
+went forward into space under the sense of an impulse received--an
+impulse simple and direct, easy above all to act upon. She was borne up
+for the hour, and now she knew why she had wanted to come by herself.
+No one in the world could have sufficiently entered into her state; no
+tie would have been close enough to enable a companion to walk beside
+her without some disparity. She literally felt, in this first flush,
+that her only company must be the human race at large, present all
+round her, but inspiringly impersonal, and that her only field must be,
+then and there, the grey immensity of London. Grey immensity had
+somehow of a sudden become her element; grey immensity was what her
+distinguished friend had, for the moment, furnished her world with and
+what the question of "living," as he put it to her, living by option,
+by volition, inevitably took on for its immediate face. She went
+straight before her, without weakness, altogether with strength; and
+still as she went she was more glad to be alone, for nobody--not Kate
+Croy, not Susan Shepherd either--would have wished to rush with her as
+she rushed. She had asked him at the last whether, being on foot, she
+might go home so, or elsewhere, and he had replied as if almost amused
+again at her extravagance: "You're active, luckily, by nature--it's
+beautiful: therefore rejoice in it. _Be_ active, without folly--for
+you're not foolish: be as active as you can and as you like." That had
+been in fact the final push, as well as the touch that most made a
+mixture of her consciousness--a strange mixture that tasted at one and
+the same time of what she had lost and what had been given her. It was
+wonderful to her, while she took her random course, that these
+quantities felt so equal: she had been treated--hadn't she?--as if it
+were in her power to live; and yet one wasn't treated so--was
+one?--unless it came up, quite as much, that one might die. The beauty
+of the bloom had gone from the small old sense of safety--that was
+distinct: she had left it behind her there forever. But the beauty of
+the idea of a great adventure, a big dim experiment or struggle in
+which she might, more responsibly than ever before, take a hand, had
+been offered her instead. It was as if she had had to pluck off her
+breast, to throw away, some friendly ornament, a familiar flower, a
+little old jewel, that was part of her daily dress; and to take up and
+shoulder as a substitute some queer defensive weapon, a musket, a
+spear, a battle-axe conducive possibly in a higher degree to a striking
+appearance, but demanding all the effort of the military posture. She
+felt this instrument, for that matter, already on her back, so that she
+proceeded now in very truth as a soldier on a march--proceeded as if,
+for her initiation, the first charge had been sounded. She passed along
+unknown streets, over dusty littery ways, between long rows of fronts
+not enhanced by the August light; she felt good for miles and only
+wanted to get lost; there were moments at corners, where she stopped
+and chose her direction, in which she quite lived up to his injunction
+to rejoice that she was active. It was like a new pleasure to have so
+new a reason; she would affirm, without delay, her option, her
+volition; taking this personal possession of what surrounded her was a
+fair affirmation to start with; and she really didn't care if she made
+it at the cost of alarms for Susie. Susie would wonder in due course
+"whatever," as they said at the hotel, had become of her; yet this
+would be nothing either, probably, to wonderments still in store.
+Wonderments in truth, Milly felt, even now attended her steps: it was
+quite as if she saw in people's eyes the reflection of her appearance
+and pace. She found herself moving at times in regions visibly not
+haunted by odd-looking girls from New York, duskily draped,
+sable-plumed, all but incongruously shod and gazing about them with
+extravagance; she might, from the curiosity she clearly excited in
+byways, in side-streets peopled with grimy children and costermongers
+carts, which she hoped were slums, literally have had her musket on her
+shoulder, have announced herself as freshly on the warpath. But for the
+fear of overdoing this character she would here and there have begun
+conversation, have asked her way; in spite of the fact that, as that
+would help the requirements of adventure, her way was exactly what she
+wanted not to know. The difficulty was that she at last accidentally
+found it; she had come out, she presently saw, at the Regent's Park,
+round which, on two or three occasions with Kate Croy, her public
+chariot had solemnly rolled. But she went into it further now; this was
+the real thing; the real thing was to be quite away from the pompous
+roads, well within the centre and on the stretches of shabby grass.
+Here were benches and smutty sheep; here were idle lads at games of
+ball, with their cries mild in the thick air; here were wanderers,
+anxious and tired like herself; here doubtless were hundreds of others
+just in the same box. Their box, their great common anxiety, what was
+it, in this grim breathing-space, but the practical question of life?
+They could live if they would; that is, like herself, they had been
+told so; she saw them all about her, on seats, digesting the
+information, feeling it altered, assimilated, recognising it again as
+something, in a slightly different shape, familiar enough, the blessed
+old truth that they would live if they could. All she thus shared with
+them made her wish to sit in their company; which she so far did that
+she looked for a bench that was empty, eschewing a still emptier chair
+that she saw hard by and for which she would have paid, with
+superiority, a fee.
+
+The last scrap of superiority had soon enough left her, if only because
+she before long knew herself for more tired than she had proposed. This
+and the charm, after a fashion, of the situation in itself made her
+linger and rest; there was a sort of spell in the sense that nobody in
+the world knew where she was. It was the first time in her life that
+this had happened; somebody, everybody appeared to have known before,
+at every instant of it, where she was; so that she was now suddenly
+able to put it to herself that that hadn't been a life. This present
+kind of thing therefore might be--which was where precisely her
+distinguished friend seemed to be wishing her to come out. He wished
+her also, it was true, not to make, as she was perhaps doing now, too
+much of her isolation; at the same time however as he clearly desired
+to deny her no decent source of interest. He was interested--she
+arrived at that--in her appealing to as many sources as possible; and
+it fairly filtered into her, as she sat and sat, that he was
+essentially propping her up. Had she been doing it herself she would
+have called it bolstering--the bolstering that was simply for the weak;
+and she thought and thought as she put together the proofs that it was
+as one of the weak he was treating her. It was of course as one of the
+weak that she had gone to him--but, oh, with how sneaking a hope that
+he might pronounce her, as to all indispensables, a veritable young
+lioness! What indeed she was really confronted with was the
+consciousness that he had not, after all, pronounced her anything: she
+nursed herself into the sense that he had beautifully got out of it.
+Did he think, however, she wondered, that he could keep out of it to
+the end?--though, as she weighed the question, she yet felt it a little
+unjust. Milly weighed, in this extraordinary hour, questions numerous
+and strange; but she had, happily, before she moved, worked round to a
+simplification. Stranger than anything, for instance, was the effect of
+its rolling over her that, when one considered it, he might perhaps
+have "got out" by one door but to come in with a beautiful, beneficent
+dishonesty by another. It kept her more intensely motionless there that
+what he might fundamentally be "up to" was some disguised intention of
+standing by her as a friend. Wasn't that what women always said they
+wanted to do when they deprecated the addresses of gentlemen they
+couldn't more intimately go on with? It was what they, no doubt,
+sincerely fancied they could make of men of whom they couldn't make
+husbands. And she didn't even reason that it was, by a similar law, the
+expedient of doctors in general for the invalids of whom they couldn't
+make patients: she was somehow so sufficiently aware that _her_ doctor
+was--however fatuous it might sound--exceptionally moved. This was the
+damning little fact--if she could talk of damnation: that she could
+believe herself to have caught him in the act of irrelevantly liking
+her. She hadn't gone to him to be liked, she had gone to him to be
+judged; and he was quite a great enough man to be in the habit, as a
+rule, of observing the difference. She could like _him,_ as she
+distinctly did--that was another matter; all the more that her doing so
+was now, so obviously for herself, compatible with judgment. Yet it
+would have been all portentously mixed had not, as we say, a final,
+merciful wave, chilling rather, but washing clear, come to her
+assistance.
+
+It came, of a sudden, when all other thought was spent. She had been
+asking herself why, if her case was grave--and she knew what she meant
+by that--he should have talked to her at all about what she might with
+futility "do"; or why on the other hand, if it were light, he should
+attach an importance to the office of friendship. She had him, with her
+little lonely acuteness--as acuteness went during the dog-days in the
+Regent's Park--in a cleft stick: she either mattered, and then she was
+ill; or she didn't matter, and then she was well enough. Now he was
+"acting," as they said at home, as if she did matter--until he should
+prove the contrary. It was too evident that a person at his high
+pressure must keep his inconsistencies, which were probably his highest
+amusements, only for the very greatest occasions. Her prevision, in
+fine, of just where she should catch him furnished the light of that
+judgment in which we describe her as daring to indulge. And the
+judgment it was that made her sensation simple. He _had_ distinguished
+her--that was the chill. He hadn't known--how could he?--that she was
+devilishly subtle, subtle exactly in the manner of the suspected, the
+suspicious, the condemned. He in fact confessed to it, in his way, as
+to an interest in her combinations, her funny race, her funny losses,
+her funny gains, her funny freedom, and, no doubt, above all, her funny
+manners--funny, like those of Americans at their best, without being
+vulgar, legitimating amiability and helping to pass it off. In his
+appreciation of these redundancies he dressed out for her the
+compassion he so signally permitted himself to waste; but its operation
+for herself was as directly divesting, denuding, exposing. It reduced
+her to her ultimate state, which was that of a poor girl with her rent
+to pay for example--staring before her in a great city. Milly had her
+rent to pay, her rent for her future; everything else but how to meet
+it fell away from her in pieces, in tatters. This was the sensation the
+great man had doubtless not purposed. Well, she must go home, like the
+poor girl, and see. There might after all be ways; the poor girl too
+would be thinking. It came back for that matter perhaps to views
+already presented. She looked about her again, on her feet, at her
+scattered, melancholy comrades--some of them so melancholy as to be
+down on their stomachs in the grass, turned away, ignoring, burrowing;
+she saw once more, with them, those two faces of the question between
+which there was so little to choose for inspiration. It was perhaps
+superficially more striking that one could live if one would; but it
+was more appealing, insinuating, irresistible, in short, that one would
+live if one could.
+
+She found after this, for the day or two, more amusement than she had
+ventured to count on in the fact, if it were not a mere fancy, of
+deceiving Susie; and she presently felt that what made the difference
+was the mere fancy--as this _was_ one--of a countermove to her great
+man. His taking on himself--should he do so--to get at her companion
+made her suddenly, she held, irresponsible, made any notion of her own
+all right for her; though indeed at the very moment she invited herself
+to enjoy this impunity she became aware of new matter for surprise, or
+at least for speculation. Her idea would rather have been that Mrs.
+Stringham would have looked at her hard--her sketch of the grounds of
+her long, independent excursion showing, she could feel, as almost
+cynically superficial. Yet the dear woman so failed, in the event, to
+avail herself of any right of criticism that it was sensibly tempting,
+for an hour, to wonder if Kate Croy had been playing perfectly fair.
+Hadn't she possibly, from motives of the highest benevolence,
+promptings of the finest anxiety, just given poor Susie what she would
+have called the straight tip? It must immediately be mentioned,
+however, that, quite apart from a remembrance of the distinctness of
+Kate's promise, Milly, the next thing, found her explanation in a truth
+that had the merit of being general. If Susie, at this crisis,
+suspiciously spared her, it was really that Susie was always
+suspiciously sparing her--yet occasionally, too, with portentous and
+exceptional mercies. The girl was conscious of how she dropped at times
+into inscrutable, impenetrable deferences--attitudes that, though
+without at all intending it, made a difference for familiarity, for the
+ease of intimacy. It was as if she recalled herself to manners, to the
+law of court-etiquette--which last note above all helped our young
+woman to a just appreciation. It was definite for her, even if not
+quite solid, that to treat her as a princess was a positive need of her
+companion's mind; wherefore she couldn't help it if this lady had her
+transcendent view of the way the class in question were treated. Susan
+had read history, had read Gibbon and Froude and Saint-Simon; she had
+high-lights as to the special allowances made for the class, and, since
+she saw them, when young, as effete and overtutored, inevitably ironic
+and infinitely refined, one must take it for amusing if she inclined to
+an indulgence verily Byzantine. If one _could_ only be
+Byzantine!--wasn't _that_ what she insidiously led one on to sigh?
+Milly tried to oblige her--for it really placed Susan herself so
+handsomely to be Byzantine now. The great ladies of that race--it would
+be somewhere in Gibbon--weren't, apparently, questioned about their
+mysteries. But oh, poor Milly and hers! Susan at all events proved
+scarce more inquisitive than if she had been a mosaic at Ravenna. Susan
+was a porcelain monument to the odd moral that consideration might,
+like cynicism, have abysses. Besides, the Puritan finally
+disencumbered----! What starved generations wasn't Mrs. Stringham, in
+fancy, going to make up for?
+
+Kate Croy came straight to the hotel--came that evening shortly before
+dinner; specifically and publicly moreover, in a hansom that, driven
+apparently very fast, pulled up beneath their windows almost with the
+clatter of an accident, a "smash." Milly, alone, as happened, in the
+great garnished void of their sitting-room, where, a little, really,
+like a caged Byzantine, she had been pacing through the queer,
+long-drawn, almost sinister delay of night, an effect she yet
+liked--Milly, at the sound, one of the French windows standing open,
+passed out to the balcony that overhung, with pretensions, the general
+entrance, and so was in time for the look that Kate, alighting, paying
+her cabman, happened to send up to the front. The visitor moreover had
+a shilling back to wait for, during which Milly, from the balcony,
+looked down at her, and a mute exchange, but with smiles and nods, took
+place between them on what had occurred in the morning. It was what
+Kate had called for, and the tone was thus, almost by accident,
+determined for Milly before her friend came up. What was also, however,
+determined for her was, again, yet irrepressibly again, that the image
+presented to her, the splendid young woman who looked so particularly
+handsome in impatience, with the fine freedom of her signal, was the
+peculiar property of somebody else's vision, that this fine freedom in
+short was the fine freedom she showed Mr. Densher. Just so was how she
+looked to him, and just so was how Milly was held by her--held as by
+the strange sense of seeing through that distant person's eyes. It
+lasted, as usual, the strange sense, but fifty seconds; yet in so
+lasting it produced an effect. It produced in fact more than one, and
+we take them in their order. The first was that it struck our young
+woman as absurd to say that a girl's looking so to a man could possibly
+be without connections; and the second was that by the time Kate had
+got into the room Milly was in mental possession of the main connection
+it must have for herself.
+
+She produced this commodity on the spot--produced it, that is, in
+straight response to Kate's frank "Well, what?" The inquiry bore of
+course, with Kate's eagerness, on the issue of the morning's scene, the
+great man's latest wisdom, and it doubtless affected Milly a little as
+the cheerful demand for news is apt to affect troubled spirits when
+news is not, in one of the neater forms, prepared for delivery. She
+couldn't have said what it was exactly that, on the instant, determined
+her; the nearest description of it would perhaps have been as the more
+vivid impression of all her friend took for granted. The contrast
+between this free quantity and the maze of possibilities through which,
+for hours, she had herself been picking her way, put on, in short, for
+the moment, a grossness that even friendly forms scarce lightened: it
+helped forward in fact the revelation to herself that she absolutely
+had nothing to tell. Besides which, certainly, there was something
+else--an influence, at the particular juncture, still more obscure.
+Kate had lost, on the way upstairs, the look--_the_ look--that made her
+young hostess so subtly think and one of the signs of which was that
+she never kept it for many moments at once; yet she stood there, none
+the less, so in her bloom and in her strength, so completely again the
+"handsome girl" beyond all others, the "handsome girl" for whom Milly
+had at first gratefully taken her, that to meet her now with the note
+of the plaintive would amount somehow to a surrender, to a confession.
+_She_ would never in her life be ill; the greatest doctor would keep
+her, at the worst, the fewest minutes; and it was as if she had asked
+just _with_ all this practical impeccability for all that was most
+mortal in her friend. These things, for Milly, inwardly danced their
+dance; but the vibration produced and the dust kicked up had lasted
+less than our account of them. Almost before she knew it she was
+answering, and answering, beautifully, with no consciousness of fraud,
+only as with a sudden flare of the famous "will-power" she had heard
+about, read about, and which was what her medical adviser had mainly
+thrown her back on. "Oh, it's all right. He's lovely."
+
+Kate was splendid, and it would have been clear for Milly now, had the
+further presumption been needed, that she had said no word to Mrs.
+Stringham. "You mean you've been absurd?"
+
+"Absurd." It was a simple word to say, but the consequence of it, for
+our young woman, was that she felt it, as soon as spoken, to have done
+something for her safety.
+
+And Kate really hung on her lips. "There's nothing at all the matter?"
+
+"Nothing to worry about. I shall take a little watching, but I shan't
+have to do anything dreadful, or even, in the least, inconvenient. I
+can do in fact as I like." It was wonderful for Milly how just to put
+it so made all its pieces fall at present quite properly into places.
+
+Yet even before the full effect came Kate had seized, kissed, blessed
+her. "My love, you're too sweet! It's too dear! But it's as I was
+sure." Then she grasped the full beauty. "You can do as you like?"
+
+"Quite. Isn't it charming?"
+
+"Ah, but catch you," Kate triumphed with gaiety, _"not_ doing----! And
+what _shall_ you do?"
+
+"For the moment simply enjoy it. Enjoy"--Milly was completely
+luminous--"having got out of my scrape."
+
+"Learning, you mean, so easily, that you _are_ well."
+
+It was as if Kate had but too conveniently put the words into her
+mouth. "Learning, I mean, so easily, that I _am_ well."
+
+"Only, no one's of course well enough to stay in London now. He can't,"
+Kate went on, "want this of you."
+
+"Mercy, no--I'm to knock about. I'm to go to places."
+
+"But not beastly 'climates'--Engadines, Rivieras, boredoms?"
+
+"No; just, as I say, where I prefer. I'm to go in for pleasure."
+
+"Oh, the duck!"--Kate, with her own shades of familiarity, abounded.
+"But what kind of pleasure?"
+
+"The highest," Milly smiled.
+
+Her friend met it as nobly. "Which is the highest?"
+
+"Well, it's just our chance to find out. You must help me."
+
+"What have I wanted to do but help you," Kate asked, "from the moment I
+first laid eyes on you?" Yet with this too Kate had her wonder. "I like
+your talking, though, about that. What help, with your luck all round,
+do you want?"
+
+
+XIV
+
+Milly indeed at last couldn't say; so that she had really for the time
+brought it along to the point so oddly marked for her by her visitor's
+arrival, the truth that she was enviably strong. She carried this out,
+from that evening, for each hour still left her, and the more easily
+perhaps that the hours were now narrowly numbered. All she actually
+waited for was Sir Luke Strett's promised visit; as to her proceeding
+on which, however, her mind was quite made up. Since he wanted to get
+at Susie he should have the freest access, and then perhaps he would
+see how he liked it. What was between _them_ they might settle as
+between them, and any pressure it should lift from her own spirit they
+were at liberty to convert to their use. If the dear man wished to fire
+Susan Shepherd with a still higher ideal, he would only after all, at
+the worst, have Susan on his hands. If devotion, in a word, was what it
+would come up for the interested pair to organise, she was herself
+ready to consume it as the dressed and served dish. He had talked to
+her of her "appetite" her account of which, she felt, must have been
+vague. But for devotion, she could now see, this appetite would be of
+the best. Gross, greedy, ravenous--these were doubtless the proper
+names for her: she was at all events resigned in advance to the
+machinations of sympathy. The day that followed her lonely excursion
+was to be the last but two or three of their stay in London; and the
+evening of that day practically ranked for them as, in the matter of
+outside relations, the last of all. People were by this time quite
+scattered, and many of those who had so liberally manifested in calls,
+in cards, in evident sincerity about visits, later on, over the land,
+had positively passed in music out of sight; whether as members, these
+latter, more especially, of Mrs. Lowder's immediate circle or as
+members of Lord Mark's--our friends being by this time able to make the
+distinction. The general pitch had thus, decidedly, dropped, and the
+occasions still to be dealt with were special and few. One of these,
+for Milly, announced itself as the doctor's call already mentioned, as
+to which she had now had a note from him: the single other, of
+importance, was their appointed leave-taking--for the shortest
+separation--in respect to Mrs. Lowder and Kate. The aunt and the niece
+were to dine with them alone, intimately and easily--as easily as
+should be consistent with the question of their afterwards going on
+together to some absurdly belated party, at which they had had it from
+Aunt Maud that they would do well to show. Sir Luke was to make his
+appearance on the morrow of this, and in respect to that complication
+Milly had already her plan.
+
+The night was, at all events, hot and stale, and it was late enough by
+the time the four ladies had been gathered in, for their small session,
+at the hotel, where the windows were still open to the high balconies
+and the flames of the candles, behind the pink shades--disposed as for
+the vigil of watchers--were motionless in the air in which the season
+lay dead. What was presently settled among them was that Milly, who
+betrayed on this occasion a preference more marked than usual, should
+not hold herself obliged to climb that evening the social stair,
+however it might stretch to meet her, and that, Mrs. Lowder and Mrs.
+Stringham facing the ordeal together, Kate Croy should remain with her
+and await their return. It was a pleasure to Milly, ever, to send Susan
+Shepherd forth; she saw her go with complacency, liked, as it were, to
+put people off with her, and noted with satisfaction, when she so moved
+to the carriage, the further denudation--a markedly ebbing tide--of her
+little benevolent back. If it wasn't quite Aunt Maud's ideal, moreover,
+to take out the new American girl's funny friend instead of the new
+American girl herself, nothing could better indicate the range of that
+lady's merit than the spirit in which--as at the present hour for
+instance--she made the best of the minor advantage. And she did this
+with a broad, cheerful absence of illusion; she did it--confessing even
+as much to poor Susie--because, frankly, she _was_ good-natured. When
+Mrs. Stringham observed that her own light was too abjectly borrowed
+and that it was as a link alone, fortunately not missing, that she was
+valued, Aunt Maud concurred to the extent of the remark: "Well, my
+dear, you're better than nothing." To-night, furthermore, it came up
+for Milly that Aunt Maud had something particular in mind. Mrs.
+Stringham, before adjourning with her, had gone off for some shawl or
+other accessory, and Kate, as if a little impatient for their
+withdrawal, had wandered out to the balcony, where she hovered, for the
+time, unseen, though with scarce more to look at than the dim London
+stars and the cruder glow, up the street, on a corner, of a small
+public-house, in front of which a fagged cab-horse was thrown into
+relief. Mrs. Lowder made use of the moment: Milly felt as soon as she
+had spoken that what she was doing was somehow for use.
+
+"Dear Susan tells me that you saw, in America, Mr. Densher--whom I've
+never till now, as you may have noticed, asked you about. But do you
+mind at last, in connection with him, doing something for me?" She had
+lowered her fine voice to a depth, though speaking with all her rich
+glibness; and Milly, after a small sharpness of surprise, was already
+guessing the sense of her appeal. "Will you name him, in any way you
+like, to _her"_--and Aunt Maud gave a nod at the window; "so that you
+may perhaps find out whether he's back?"
+
+Ever so many things, for Milly, fell into line at this; it was a
+wonder, she afterwards thought, that she could be conscious of so many
+at once. She smiled hard, however, for them all. "But I don't know that
+it's important to me to 'find out.'" The array of things was further
+swollen, however, even as she said this, by its striking her as too
+much to say. She therefore tried as quickly to say less. "Except you
+mean, of course, that it's important to _you."_ She fancied Aunt Maud
+was looking at her almost as hard as she was herself smiling, and that
+gave her another impulse. "You know I never _have_ yet named him to
+her; so that if I should break out now----"
+
+"Well?"--Mrs. Lowder waited.
+
+"Why, she may wonder what I've been making a mystery of. She hasn't
+mentioned him, you know," Milly went on, "herself."
+
+"No"--her friend a little heavily weighed it--"she wouldn't. So it's
+she, you see then, who has made the mystery."
+
+Yes, Milly but wanted to see; only there was so much. "There has been
+of course no particular reason." Yet that indeed was neither here nor
+there. "Do you think," she asked, "he is back?"
+
+"It will be about his time, I gather, and rather a comfort to me
+definitely to know."
+
+"Then can't you ask her yourself?"
+
+"Ah, we never speak of him!"
+
+It helped Milly for the moment to the convenience of a puzzled pause.
+"Do you mean he's an acquaintance of whom you disapprove for her?"
+
+Aunt Maud, as well, just hung fire. "I disapprove of _her_ for the poor
+young man. She doesn't care for him."
+
+"And _he_ cares so much----?"
+
+"Too much, too much. And my fear is," said Mrs. Lowder, "that he
+privately besets her. She keeps it to herself, but I don't want her
+worried. Neither, in truth," she both generously and confidentially
+concluded, "do I want _him."_
+
+Milly showed all her own effort to meet the case. "But what can _I_ do?"
+
+"You can find out where they are. If I myself try," Mrs. Lowder
+explained, "I shall appear to treat them as if I supposed them
+deceiving me."
+
+"And you don't. You don't," Milly mused for her, "suppose them
+deceiving you."
+
+"Well," said Aunt Maud, whose fine onyx eyes failed to blink, even
+though Milly's questions might have been taken as drawing her rather
+further than she had originally meant to go--"well, Kate is thoroughly
+aware of my views for her, and that I take her being with me, at
+present, in the way she is with me, if you know what I mean, as a loyal
+assent to them. Therefore as my views don't happen to provide a place,
+at all, for Mr. Densher, much, in a manner, as I like him"--therefore,
+therefore in short she had been prompted to this step, though she
+completed her sense, but sketchily, with the rattle of her large fan.
+
+It assisted them perhaps, however, for the moment, that Milly was able
+to pick out of her sense what might serve as the clearest part of it.
+"You do like him then?"
+
+"Oh dear, yes. Don't you?"
+
+Milly hesitated, for the question was somehow as the sudden point of
+something sharp on a nerve that winced. She just caught her breath, but
+she had ground for joy afterwards, she felt, in not really having
+failed to choose with quickness sufficient, out of fifteen possible
+answers, the one that would best serve her. She was then almost proud,
+as well, that she had cheerfully smiled. "I did--three times--in New
+York." So came and went for her, in these simple words, the speech that
+was to figure for her, later on, that night, as the one she had ever
+uttered that cost her most. She was to lie awake, at all events, half
+the night, for the gladness of not having taken any line so really
+inferior as the denial of a happy impression.
+
+For Mrs. Lowder also, moreover, her simple words were the right ones;
+they were at any rate, that lady's laugh showed, in the natural note of
+the racy. "You dear American thing! But people may be very good, and
+yet not good for what one wants."
+
+"Yes," the girl assented, "even I suppose when what one wants is
+something very good."
+
+"Oh, my child, it would take too long just now to tell you all _I_
+want! I want everything at once and together--and ever so much for you
+too, you know. But you've seen us," Aunt Maud continued; "you'll have
+made out."
+
+"Ah," said Milly, "I _don't_ make out"; for again--it came that way in
+rushes--she felt an obscurity in things. "Why, if our friend here
+doesn't like him----"
+
+"Should I conceive her interested in keeping things from me?" Mrs.
+Lowder did justice to the question. "My dear, how can you ask? Put
+yourself in her place. She meets me, but on _her_ terms. Proud young
+women are proud young women. And proud old ones are--well, what _I_ am.
+Fond of you as we both are, you can help us."
+
+Milly tried to be inspired. "Does it come back then to my asking her
+straight?"
+
+At this, however, finally, Aunt Maud threw her up. "Oh, if you've so
+many reasons not----!"
+
+"I've not so many," Milly smiled "but I've one. If I break out so
+suddenly as knowing him, what will she make of my not having spoken
+before?"
+
+Mrs. Lowder looked blank at it. "Why should you care what she makes?
+You may have only been decently discreet."
+
+"Ah, I _have_ been," the girl made haste to say.
+
+"Besides," her friend went on, "I suggested to you, through Susan, your
+line."
+
+"Yes, that reason's a reason for _me."_
+
+"And for _me,"_ Mrs. Lowder insisted. "She's not therefore so stupid as
+not to do justice to grounds so marked. You can tell her perfectly that
+I had asked you to say nothing."
+
+"And may I tell her that you've asked me now to speak?"
+
+Mrs. Lowder might well have thought, yet, oddly, this pulled her up.
+"You can't do it without----?"
+
+Milly was almost ashamed to be raising so many difficulties. "I'll do
+what I can if you'll kindly tell me one thing more." She faltered a
+little--it was so prying; but she brought it out. "Will he have been
+writing to her?"
+
+"It's exactly, my dear, what I should like to know." Mrs. Lowder was at
+last impatient. "Push in for yourself, and I dare say she'll tell you."
+
+Even now, all the same, Milly had not quite fallen back. "It will be
+pushing in," she continued to smile, "for _you"_ She allowed her
+companion, however, no time to take this up. "The point will be that if
+he _has_ been writing she may have answered."
+
+"But what point, you subtle thing, is that?"
+
+"It isn't subtle, it seems to me, but quite simple," Milly said, "that
+if she has answered she has very possibly spoken of me."
+
+"Very certainly indeed. But what difference will it make?"
+
+The girl had a moment, at this, of thinking it natural that her
+interlocutress herself should so fail of subtlety. "It will make the
+difference that he will have written to her in answer that he knows me.
+And that, in turn," our young woman explained, "will give an oddity to
+my own silence."
+
+"How so, if she's perfectly aware of having given you no opening? The
+only oddity," Aunt Maud lucidly professed, "is for yourself. It's in
+_her_ not having spoken."
+
+"Ah, there we are!" said Milly.
+
+And she had uttered it, evidently, in a tone that struck her friend.
+"Then it _has_ troubled you?"
+
+But ah, the inquiry had only to be made to bring the rare colour with
+fine inconsequence, to her face. "Not, really, the least little bit!"
+And, quickly feeling the need to abound in this sense, she was on the
+point, to cut short, of declaring that she cared, after all, no scrap
+how much she obliged. Only she felt at this instant too the
+intervention of still other things. Mrs. Lowder was, in the first
+place, already beforehand, already affected as by the sudden vision of
+her having herself pushed too far. Milly could never judge from her
+face of her uppermost motive--it was so little, in its hard, smooth
+sheen, that kind of human countenance. She looked hard when she spoke
+fair; the only thing was that when she spoke hard she likewise didn't
+look soft. Something, none the less, had arisen in her now--a full
+appreciable tide, entering by the rupture of some bar. She announced
+that if what she had asked was to prove in the least a bore her young
+friend was not to dream of it; making her young friend at the same
+time, by the change in her tone, dream on the spot more profusely. She
+spoke with a belated light, Milly could apprehend--she could always
+apprehend--from pity; and the result of that perception, for the girl,
+was singular: it proved to her as quickly that Kate, keeping her
+secret, had been straight with her. From Kate distinctly then, as to
+why she was to be pitied, Aunt Maud knew nothing, and was thereby
+simply putting in evidence the fine side of her own character. This
+fine side was that she could almost at any hour, by a kindled
+preference or a diverted energy, glow for another interest than her
+own. She exclaimed as well, at this moment, that Milly must have been
+thinking, round the case, much more than she had supposed; and this
+remark could, at once, affect the girl as sharply as any other form of
+the charge of weakness. It was what everyone, if she didn't look out,
+would soon be saying--"There's something the matter with you!" What one
+was therefore one's self concerned immediately to establish was that
+there was nothing at all. "I shall like to help you; I shall like, so
+far as that goes, to help Kate herself," she made such haste as she
+could to declare; her eyes wandering meanwhile across the width of the
+room to that dusk of the balcony in which their companion perhaps a
+little unaccountably lingered. She suggested hereby her impatience to
+begin; she almost overtly wondered at the length of the opportunity
+this friend was giving them--referring it, however, so far as words
+went, to the other friend, breaking off with an amused: "How
+tremendously Susie must be beautifying!"
+
+It only marked Aunt Maud, none the less, as too preoccupied for her
+allusion. The onyx eyes were fixed upon her with a polished pressure
+that must signify some enriched benevolence. "Let it go, my dear. We
+shall, after all, soon enough see."
+
+"If he _has_ come back we shall certainly see," Milly after a moment
+replied; "for he'll probably feel that he can't quite civilly not come
+to see me. Then _there,"_ she remarked, "we shall be. It wouldn't then,
+you see, come through Kate at all--it would come through him. Except,"
+she wound up with a smile, "that he won't find me."
+
+She had the most extraordinary sense of interesting her interlocutress,
+in spite of herself, more than she wanted; it was as if her doom so
+floated her on that she couldn't stop--by very much the same trick it
+had played her with her doctor. "Shall you run away from him?"
+
+She neglected the question, wanting only now to get off. "Then," she
+went on, "you'll deal with Kate directly."
+
+"Shall you run away from _her?"_ Mrs. Lowder profoundly inquired, while
+they became aware of Susie's return through the room, opening out
+behind them, in which they had dined.
+
+This affected Milly as giving her but an instant; and suddenly, with
+it, everything she felt in the connection rose to her lips in a
+question that, even as she put it, she knew she was failing to keep
+colourless. "Is it your own belief that he _is_ with her?"
+
+Aunt Maud took it in--took in, that is, everything of the tone that she
+just wanted her not to; and the result for some seconds, was but to
+make their eyes meet in silence. Mrs. Stringham had rejoined them and
+was asking if Kate had gone--an inquiry at once answered by this young
+lady's reappearance. They saw her again in the open window, where,
+looking at them, she had paused--producing thus, on Aunt Maud's part,
+almost too impressive a "Hush!" Mrs. Lowder indeed, without loss of
+time, smothered any danger in a sweeping retreat with Susie; but
+Milly's words to her, just uttered, about dealing with her niece
+directly, struck our young woman as already recoiling on herself.
+Directness, however evaded, would be, fully, for _her;_ nothing in fact
+would ever have been for her so direct as the evasion. Kate had
+remained in the window, very handsome and upright, the outer dark
+framing in a highly favourable way her summery simplicities and
+lightnesses of dress. Milly had, given the relation of space, no real
+fear she had heard their talk; only she hovered there as with conscious
+eyes and some added advantage. Then indeed, with small delay, her
+friend sufficiently saw. The conscious eyes, the added advantage were
+but those she had now always at command--those proper to the person
+Milly knew as known to Merton Densher. It was for several seconds again
+as if the _total_ of her identity had been that of the person known to
+him--a determination having for result another sharpness of its own.
+Kate had positively but to be there just as she was to tell her he had
+come back. It seemed to pass between them, in fine, without a word,
+that he was in London, that he was perhaps only round the corner; and
+surely therefore no dealing of Milly's with her would yet have been so
+direct.
+
+
+XV
+
+It was doubtless because this queer form of directness had in itself,
+for the hour, seemed so sufficient that Milly was afterwards aware of
+having really, all the while--during the strange, indescribable session
+before the return of their companions--done nothing to intensify it. If
+she was most aware only afterwards, under the long, discurtained ordeal
+of the morrow's dawn, that was because she had really, till their
+evening's end came, ceased, after a little, to miss anything from their
+ostensible comfort. What was behind showed but in gleams and glimpses;
+what was in front never at all confessed to not holding the stage.
+Three minutes had not passed before Milly quite knew she should have
+done nothing Aunt Maud had just asked her. She knew it moreover by much
+the same light that had acted for her with that lady and with Sir Luke
+Strett. It pressed upon her then and there that she was still in a
+current determined, through her indifference, timidity, bravery,
+generosity--she scarce could say which--by others; that not she but the
+current acted, and that somebody else, always, was the keeper of the
+lock or the dam. Kate for example had but to open the flood-gate: the
+current moved in its mass--the current, as it had been, of her doing as
+Kate wanted. What, somehow, in the most extraordinary way in the world,
+_had_ Kate wanted but to be, of a sudden, more interesting than she had
+ever been? Milly, for their evening then, quite held her breath with
+the appreciation of it. If she hadn't been sure her companion would
+have had nothing, from her moments with Mrs. Lowder, to go by, she
+would almost have seen the admirable creature "cutting in" to
+anticipate a danger. This fantasy indeed, while they sat together,
+dropped after a little; even if only because other fantasies multiplied
+and clustered, making fairly, for our young woman, the buoyant medium
+in which her friend talked and moved. They sat together, I say, but
+Kate moved as much as she talked; she figured there, restless and
+charming, just perhaps a shade perfunctory, repeatedly quitting her
+place, taking slowly, to and fro, in the trailing folds of her light
+dress, the length of the room, and almost avowedly performing for the
+pleasure of her hostess.
+
+Mrs. Lowder had said to Milly at Matcham that she and her niece, as
+allies, could practically conquer the world; but though it was a speech
+about which there had even then been a vague, grand glamour, the girl
+read into it at present more of an approach to a meaning. Kate, for
+that matter, by herself, could conquer anything, and _she,_ Milly
+Theale, was probably concerned with the "world" only as the small scrap
+of it that most impinged on her and that was therefore first to be
+dealt with. On this basis of being dealt with she would doubtless
+herself do her share of the conquering: she would have something to
+supply, Kate something to take--each of them thus, to that tune,
+something for squaring with Aunt Maud's ideal. This in short was what
+it came to now--that the occasion, in the quiet late lamplight, had the
+quality of a rough rehearsal of the possible big drama. Milly knew
+herself dealt with--handsomely, completely: she surrendered to the
+knowledge, for so it was, she felt, that she supplied her helpful
+force. And what Kate had to take Kate took as freely and, to all
+appearance, as gratefully; accepting afresh, with each of her long,
+slow walks, the relation between them so established and consecrating
+her companion's surrender simply by the interest she gave it. The
+interest to Milly herself we naturally mean; the interest to Kate Milly
+felt as probably inferior. It easily and largely came for their present
+talk, for the quick flight of the hour before the breach of the
+spell--it all came, when considered, from the circumstance, not in the
+least abnormal, that the handsome girl was in extraordinary "form."
+Milly remembered her having said that she was at her best late at
+night; remembered it by its having, with its fine assurance, made her
+wonder when _she_ was at her best and how happy people must be who had
+such a fixed time. She had no time at all; she was never at her
+best--unless indeed it were exactly, as now, in listening, watching,
+admiring, collapsing. If Kate moreover, quite mercilessly, had never
+been so good, the beauty and the marvel of it was that she had never
+really been so frank; being a person of such a calibre, as Milly would
+have said, that, even while "dealing" with you and thereby, as it were,
+picking her steps, she could let herself go, could, in irony, in
+confidence, in extravagance, tell you things she had never told before.
+That was the impression--that she was telling things, and quite
+conceivably for her own relief as well; almost as if the errors of
+vision, the mistakes of proportion, the residuary innocence of spirit
+still to be remedied on the part of her auditor had their moments of
+proving too much for her nerves. She went at them just now, these
+sources of irritation, with an amused energy that it would have been
+open to Milly to regard as cynical and that was nevertheless called
+for--as to this the other was distinct--by the way that in certain
+connections the American mind broke down. It seemed at least--the
+American mind as sitting there thrilled and dazzled in Milly--not to
+understand English society without a separate confrontation with _all_
+the cases. It couldn't proceed by--there was some technical term she
+lacked until Milly suggested both analogy and induction, and then,
+differently, instinct, none of which were right: it had to be led up
+and introduced to each aspect of the monster, enabled to walk all round
+it, whether for the consequent exaggerated ecstasy or for the still
+more as appeared to this critic disproportionate shock. It might, the
+monster, Kate conceded, loom large for those born amid forms less
+developed and therefore no doubt less amusing; it might on some sides
+be a strange and dreadful monster, calculated to devour the unwary, to
+abase the proud, to scandalize the good; but if one had to live with it
+one must, not to be for ever sitting up, learn how: which was virtually
+in short to-night what the handsome girl showed herself as teaching.
+
+She gave away publicly, in this process, Lancaster Gate and everything
+it contained; she gave away, hand over hand, Milly's thrill continued
+to note, Aunt Maud and Aunt Maud's glories and Aunt Maud's
+complacencies; she gave herself away most of all, and it was naturally
+what most contributed to her candour. She didn't speak to her friend
+once more, in Aunt Maud's strain, of how they could scale the skies;
+she spoke, by her bright, perverse preference on this occasion, of the
+need, in the first place, of being neither stupid nor vulgar. It might
+have been a lesson, for our young American, in the art of seeing things
+as they were--a lesson so various and so sustained that the pupil had,
+as we have shown, but receptively to gape. The odd thing furthermore
+was that it could serve its purpose while explicitly disavowing every
+personal bias. It wasn't that she disliked Aunt Maud, who was
+everything she had on other occasions declared; but the dear woman,
+ineffaceably stamped by inscrutable nature and a dreadful art,
+wasn't--how _could_ she be?--what she wasn't. She wasn't any one. She
+wasn't anything. She wasn't anywhere. Milly mustn't think it--one
+couldn't, as a good friend, let her. Those hours at Matcham were
+_inesperees,_ were pure manna from heaven; or if not wholly that
+perhaps, with humbugging old Lord Mark as a backer, were vain as a
+ground for hopes and calculations. Lord Mark was very well, but he
+wasn't _the_ cleverest creature in England, and even if he had been he
+still wouldn't have been the most obliging. He weighed it out in
+ounces, and indeed each of the pair was really waiting for what the
+other would put down.
+
+"She has put down _you."_ said Milly, attached to the subject still;
+"and I think what you mean is that, on the counter, she still keeps
+hold of you."
+
+"Lest"--Kate took it up--"he should suddenly grab me and run? Oh, as he
+isn't ready to run, he's much less ready, naturally, to grab. I
+_am_--you're so far right as that--on the counter, when I'm not in the
+shop-window; in and out of which I'm thus conveniently, commercially
+whisked: the essence, all of it, of my position, and the price, as
+properly, of my aunt's protection." Lord Mark was substantially what
+she had begun with as soon as they were alone; the impression was even
+yet with Milly of her having sounded his name, having imposed it, as a
+topic, in direct opposition to the other name that Mrs. Lowder had left
+in the air and that all her own look, as we have seen, kept there at
+first for her companion. The immediate strange effect had been that of
+her consciously needing, as it were, an alibi--which, successfully, she
+so found. She had worked it to the end, ridden it to and fro across the
+course marked for Milly by Aunt Maud, and now she had quite, so to
+speak, broken it in. "The bore is that if she wants him so much--wants
+him, heaven forgive her! for _me_--he has put us all out, since your
+arrival, by wanting somebody else. I don't mean somebody else than you."
+
+Milly threw off the charm sufficiently to shake her head. "Then I
+haven't made out who it is. If I'm any part of his alternative he had
+better stop where he is."
+
+"Truly, truly?--always, always?"
+
+Milly tried to insist with an equal gaiety. "Would you like me to
+swear?"
+
+Kate appeared for a moment--though that was doubtless but gaiety
+too--to think. "Haven't we been swearing enough?"
+
+"You have perhaps, but I haven't, and I ought to give you the
+equivalent. At any rate there it is. Truly, truly as you say--'always,
+always.' So I'm not in the way."
+
+"Thanks," said Kate--"but that doesn't help me."
+
+"Oh, it's as simplifying for _him_ that I speak of it."
+
+"The difficulty really is that he's a person with so many ideas that
+it's particularly hard to simplify for him. That's exactly of course
+what Aunt Maud has been trying. He won't," Kate firmly continued, "make
+up his mind about me."
+
+"Well," Milly smiled, "give him time."
+
+Her friend met it in perfection. "One is _doing_ that--one _is._ But
+one remains, all the same, but one of his ideas."
+
+"There's no harm in that," Milly returned, "if you come out in the end
+as the best of them. What's a man," she pursued, "especially an
+ambitious one, without a variety of ideas?"
+
+"No doubt. The more the merrier." And Kate looked at her grandly. "One
+can but hope to come out, and do nothing to prevent it."
+
+All of which made for the impression, fantastic or not, of the _alibi._
+The splendour, the grandeur were, for Milly, the bold ironic spirit
+behind it, so interesting too in itself. What, moreover, was not less
+interesting was the fact, as our young woman noted it, that Kate
+confined her point to the difficulties, so far as _she_ was concerned,
+raised only by Lord Mark. She referred now to none that her own taste
+might present; which circumstance again played its little part. She was
+doing what she liked in respect to another person, but she was in no
+way committed to the other person, and her furthermore talking of Lord
+Mark as not young and not true were only the signs of her clear
+self-consciousness, were all in the line of her slightly hard, but
+scarce the less graceful extravagance. She didn't wish to show too much
+her consent to be arranged for, but that was a different thing from not
+wishing sufficiently to give it. There was something moreover, on it
+all, that Milly still found occasion to say, "If your aunt has been, as
+you tell me, put out by me, I feel that she has remained remarkably
+kind."
+
+"Oh, but she has--whatever might have happened in that respect--plenty
+of use for you! You put her in, my dear, more than you put her out. You
+don't half see it, but she has clutched your petticoat. You can do
+anything--you can do, I mean, lots that _we_ can't. You're an outsider,
+independent and standing by yourself; you're not hideously relative to
+tiers and tiers of others." And Kate, facing in that direction, went
+further and further; wound up, while Milly gaped, with extraordinary
+words. "We're of no use to you--it's decent to tell you. You'd be of
+use to us, but that's a different matter. My honest advice to you would
+be--" she went indeed all lengths--"to drop us while you can. It would
+be funny if you didn't soon see how awfully better you can do. We've
+not really done for you the least thing worth speaking of--nothing you
+mightn't easily have had in some other way. Therefore you're under no
+obligation. You won't want us next year; we shall only continue to want
+_you._ But that's no reason for you, and you mustn't pay too dreadfully
+for poor Mrs. Stringham's having let you in. She has the best
+conscience in the world; she's enchanted with what she has done; but
+you shouldn't take your people from _her._ It has been quite awful to
+see you do it."
+
+Milly tried to be amused, so as not--it was too absurd--to be fairly
+frightened. Strange enough indeed--if not natural enough--that, late at
+night thus, in a mere mercenary house, with Susie away, a want of
+confidence should possess her. She recalled, with all the rest of it,
+the next day, piecing things together in the dawn, that she had felt
+herself alone with a creature who paced like a panther. That was a
+violent image, but it made her a little less ashamed of having been
+scared. For all her scare, none the less, she had now the sense to find
+words. "And yet without Susie I shouldn't have had you."
+
+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; and, though a small solemnity
+of reproach, a sombre strain, had broken into her tone, it was to
+figure as her nearest approach to serving Mrs. Lowder. "Why do you say
+such things to me?"
+
+This unexpectedly had acted, by a sudden turn of Kate's attitude, as a
+happy speech. 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; partly as if, though a dove who could perch on a
+finger, one were also a princess with whom forms were to be observed.
+It even came to her, through the touch of her companion's lips, that
+this form, this cool pressure, fairly sealed the sense of what Kate had
+just said. It was moreover, for the girl, like an inspiration: she
+found herself accepting as the right one, while she caught her breath
+with relief, the name so given her. 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. Lowder, with
+Susan--which she needn't have done, at that hour, instead of letting
+Kate come down to her; so that Milly could be quite sure it was to
+catch hold, in some way, of the loose end they had left. Well, the way
+she did catch was simply to make the point that it didn't now in the
+least matter. She had mounted the stairs for this, and she had her
+moment again with her younger hostess while Kate, on the spot, as the
+latter at the time noted, gave Susan Shepherd unwonted opportunities.
+Kate was in other words, as Aunt Maud engaged her friend, listening
+with the handsomest response to Mrs. Stringham's impression of the
+scene they had just quitted. It was in the tone of the fondest
+indulgence--almost, really, that of dove cooing to dove--that Mrs.
+Lowder expressed to Milly the hope that it had all gone beautifully.
+Her "all" had an ample benevolence; it soothed and simplified; she
+spoke as if it were the two young women, not she and her comrade, who
+had been facing the town together. But Milly's answer had prepared
+itself while Aunt Maud was on the stair; she had felt in a rush all the
+reasons that would make it the most dovelike; and she gave it, while
+she was about it, as earnest, as candid. "I don't _think,_ dear lady,
+he's here."
+
+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: she studied again the dovelike and so
+set her companion to mere rich reporting that she averted all inquiry
+into her own case.
+
+That, with the new day, was once more her law--though she saw before
+her, of course, as something of a complication, her need, each time, to
+decide. She should have to be clear as to how a dove _would_ act. She
+settled it, she thought, well enough this morning by quite readopting
+her plan in respect to Sir Luke Strett. That, she was pleased to
+reflect, had originally been pitched in the key of a merely iridescent
+drab; and although Mrs. Stringham, after breakfast, began by staring at
+it as if it had been a priceless Persian carpet suddenly unrolled at
+her feet, she had no scruple, at the end of five minutes, in leaving
+her to make the best of it. "Sir Luke Strett comes, by appointment, to
+see me at eleven, but I'm going out on purpose. He's to be told,
+please, deceptively, that I'm at home, and, you, as my representative,
+when he comes up, are to see him instead. He will like that, this time,
+better. So do be nice to him." It had taken, naturally, more
+explanation, and the mention, above all, of the fact that the visitor
+was the greatest of doctors; yet when once the key had been offered
+Susie slipped it on her bunch, and her young friend could again feel
+her lovely imagination operate. It operated in truth very much as Mrs.
+Lowder's, at the last, had done the night before: it made the air heavy
+once more with the extravagance of assent. It might, afresh, almost
+have frightened our young woman to see how people rushed to meet her:
+_had_ she then so little time to live that the road must always be
+spared her? It was as if they were helping her to take it out on the
+spot. Susie--she couldn't deny, and didn't pretend to--might, of a
+truth, on _her_ side, have treated such news as a flash merely lurid;
+as to which, to do Susie justice, the pain of it was all there. But,
+none the less, the margin always allowed her young friend was all there
+as well; and the proposal now made her what was it in short but
+Byzantine? The vision of Milly's perception of the propriety of the
+matter had, at any rate, quickly engulfed, so far as her attitude was
+concerned, any surprise and any shock; so that she only desired, the
+next thing, perfectly to possess the facts. Milly could easily speak,
+on this, as if there were only one: she made nothing of such another as
+that she had felt herself menaced. The great fact, in fine, was that
+she _knew_ him to desire just now, more than anything else, to meet,
+quite apart, some one interested in her. Who therefore so interested as
+her faithful Susan? The only other circumstance that, by the time she
+had quitted her friend, she had treated as worth mentioning was the
+circumstance of her having at first intended to keep quiet. She had
+originally best seen herself as sweetly secretive. As to that she had
+changed, and her present request was the result. She didn't say why she
+had changed, but she trusted her faithful Susan. Their visitor would
+trust her not less, and she herself would adore their visitor. Moreover
+he wouldn't--the girl felt sure--tell her anything dreadful. The worst
+would be that he was in love and that he needed a confidant to work it.
+And now she was going to the National Gallery.
+
+
+XVI
+
+The idea of the National Gallery had been with her from the moment of
+her hearing from Sir Luke Strett about his hour of coming. It had been
+in her mind as a place so meagrely visited, as one of the places that
+had seemed at home one of the attractions of Europe and one of its
+highest aids to culture, but that--the old story--the typical frivolous
+always ended by sacrificing to vulgar pleasures. She had had perfectly,
+at those whimsical moments on the Bruenig, the half-shamed sense of
+turning her back on such opportunities for real improvement as had
+figured to her, from of old, in connection with the continental tour,
+under the general head of "pictures and things"; and now she knew for
+what she had done so. The plea had been explicit--she had done so for
+life, as opposed to learning; the upshot of which had been that life
+was now beautifully provided for. In spite of those few dips and dashes
+into the many-coloured stream of history for which of late Kate Croy
+had helped her to find time, there were possible great chances she had
+neglected, possible great moments she should, save for to-day, have all
+but missed. She might still, she had felt, overtake one or two of them
+among the Titians and the Turners; she had been honestly nursing the
+hour, and, once she was in the benignant halls, her faith knew itself
+justified. It was the air she wanted and the world she would now
+exclusively choose; the quiet chambers, nobly overwhelming, rich but
+slightly veiled, opened out round her and made her presently say "If I
+could lose myself _here!"_ There were people, people in plenty, but,
+admirably, no personal question. It was immense, outside, the personal
+question; but she had blissfully left it outside, and the nearest it
+came, for a quarter of an hour, to glimmering again into sight was when
+she watched for a little one of the more earnest of the lady-copyists.
+Two or three in particular, spectacled, aproned, absorbed, engaged her
+sympathy to an absurd extent, seemed to show her for the time the right
+way to live. She should have been a lady copyist--it met so the case.
+The case was the case of escape, of living under water, of being at
+once impersonal and firm. There it was before one--one had only to
+stick and stick.
+
+Milly yielded to this charm till she was almost ashamed; she watched
+the lady-copyists till she found herself wondering what would be
+thought by others of a young woman, of adequate aspect, who should
+appear to regard them as the pride of the place. She would have liked
+to talk to them, to get, as it figured to her, into their lives, and
+was deterred but by the fact that she didn't quite see herself as
+purchasing imitations and yet feared she might excite the expectation
+of purchase. She really knew before long that what held her was the
+mere refuge, that something within her was after all too weak for the
+Turners and Titians. They joined hands about her in a circle too vast,
+though a circle that a year before she would only have desired to
+trace. They were truly for the larger, not for the smaller life, the
+life of which the actual pitch, for example, was an interest, the
+interest of compassion, in misguided efforts. She marked absurdly her
+little stations, blinking, in her shrinkage of curiosity, at the
+glorious walls, yet keeping an eye on vistas and approaches, so that
+she shouldn't be flagrantly caught. The vistas and approaches drew her
+in this way from room to room, and she had been through many parts of
+the show, as she supposed, when she sat down to rest. There were chairs
+in scant clusters, places from which one could gaze. Milly indeed at
+present fixed her eyes more than elsewhere on the appearance, first,
+that she couldn't quite, after all, have accounted to an examiner for
+the order of her "schools," and then on that of her being more tired
+than she had meant, in spite of her having been so much less
+intelligent. They found, her eyes, it should be added, other occupation
+as well, which she let them freely follow: they rested largely, in her
+vagueness, on the vagueness of other visitors; they attached themselves
+in especial, with mixed results, to the surprising stream of her
+compatriots. She was struck with the circumstance that the great
+museum, early in August, was haunted with these pilgrims, as also with
+that of her knowing them from afar, marking them easily, each and all,
+and recognising not less promptly that they had ever new lights for
+her--new lights on their own darkness. She gave herself up at last, and
+it was a consummation like another: what she should have come to the
+National Gallery for to-day would be to watch the copyists and reckon
+the Baedekers. That perhaps was the moral of a menaced state of
+health--that one would sit in public places and count the Americans. It
+passed the time in a manner; but it seemed already the second line of
+defence, and this notwithstanding the pattern, so unmistakable, of her
+country-folk. They were cut out as by scissors, coloured, labelled,
+mounted; but their relation to her failed to act--they somehow did
+nothing for her. Partly, no doubt, they didn't so much as notice or
+know her, didn't even recognise their community of collapse with her,
+the sign on her, as she sat there, that for her too Europe was "tough."
+It came to her idly thus--for her humour could still play--that she
+didn't seem then the same success with them as with the inhabitants of
+London, who had taken her up on scarce more of an acquaintance. She
+could wonder if they would be different should she go back with that
+glamour attached; and she could also wonder, if it came to that,
+whether she should ever go back. Her friends straggled past, at any
+rate, in all the vividness of their absent criticism, and she had even
+at last the sense of taking a mean advantage. There was a finer
+instant, however, at which three ladies, clearly a mother and
+daughters, had paused before her under compulsion of a comment
+apparently just uttered by one of them and referring to some object on
+the other side of the room. Milly had her back to the object, but her
+face very much to her young compatriot, the one who had spoken and in
+whose look she perceived a certain gloom of recognition. Recognition,
+for that matter, sat confessedly in her own eyes: she _knew_ the three,
+generically, as easily as a schoolboy with a crib in his lap would know
+the answer in class; she felt, like the schoolboy, guilty
+enough--questioned, as honour went, as to her right so to possess, to
+dispossess, people who hadn't consciously provoked her. She would have
+been able to say where they lived, and how, had the place and the way
+been but amenable to the positive; she bent tenderly, in imagination,
+over marital, paternal Mr. Whatever-he-was, at home, eternally named,
+with all the honours and placidities, but eternally unseen and existing
+only as some one who could be financially heard from. The mother, the
+puffed and composed whiteness of whose hair had no relation to her
+apparent age, showed a countenance almost chemically clean and dry; her
+companions wore an air of vague resentment humanised by fatigue; and
+the three were equally adorned with short cloaks of coloured cloth
+surmounted by little tartan hoods. The tartans were doubtless
+conceivable as different, but the cloaks, curiously, only thinkable as
+one. "Handsome? Well, if you choose to say so." It was the mother who
+had spoken, who herself added, after a pause during which Milly took
+the reference as to a picture: "In the English style." The three pair
+of eyes had converged, and their possessors had for an instant rested,
+with the effect of a drop of the subject, on this last
+characterisation--with that, too, of a gloom not less mute in one of
+the daughters than murmured in the other. Milly's heart went out to
+them while they turned their backs; she said to herself that they ought
+to have known her, that there was something between them they might
+have beautifully put together. But she had lost _them_ also--they were
+cold; they left her in her weak wonder as to what they had been looking
+at. The "handsome" disposed her to turn--all the more that the "English
+style" would be the English school, which she liked; only she saw,
+before moving, by the array on the side facing her, that she was in
+fact among small Dutch pictures. The action of this was again
+appreciable--the dim surmise that it wouldn't then be by a picture that
+the spring in the three ladies had been pressed. It was at all events
+time she should go, and she turned as she got on her feet. She had had
+behind her one of the entrances and various visitors who had come in
+while she sat, visitors single and in pairs--by one of the former of
+whom she felt her eyes suddenly held.
+
+This was a gentleman in the middle of the place, a gentleman who had
+removed his hat and was for a moment, while he glanced, absently, as
+she could see, at the top tier of the collection, tapping his forehead
+with his pocket-handkerchief. The occupation held him long enough to
+give Milly time to take for granted--and a few seconds sufficed--that
+his face was the object just observed by her friends. This could only
+have been because she concurred in their tribute, even qualified, and
+indeed "the English style" of the gentleman--perhaps by instant
+contrast to the American--was what had had the arresting power. This
+arresting power, at the same time--and that was the marvel--had already
+sharpened almost to pain, for in the very act of judging the bared head
+with detachment she felt herself shaken by a knowledge of it. It was
+Merton Densher's own, and he was standing there, standing long enough
+unconscious for her to fix him and then hesitate. These successions
+were swift, so that she could still ask herself in freedom if she had
+best let him see her. She could still reply to that that she shouldn't
+like him to catch her in the effort to prevent this; and she might
+further have decided that he was too preoccupied to see anything had
+not a perception intervened that surpassed the first in violence. She
+was unable to think afterwards how long she had looked at him before
+knowing herself as otherwise looked at; all she was coherently to put
+together was that she had had a second recognition without his having
+noticed her. The source of this latter shock was nobody less than Kate
+Croy--Kate Croy who was suddenly also in the line of vision and whose
+eyes met her eyes at their next movement. Kate was but two yards
+off--Mr. Densher wasn't alone. Kate's face specifically said so, for
+after a stare as blank at first as Milly's it broke into a far smile.
+That was what, wonderfully--in addition to the marvel of their
+meeting--passed from her for Milly; the instant reduction to easy terms
+of the fact of their being there, the two young women, together. It was
+perhaps only afterwards that the girl fully felt the connection between
+this touch and her already established conviction that Kate was a
+prodigious person; yet on the spot she none the less, in a degree, knew
+herself handled and again, as she had been the night before, dealt
+with--absolutely even dealt with for her greater pleasure. A minute in
+fine hadn't elapsed before Kate had somehow made her provisionally take
+everything as natural. The provisional was just the charm--acquiring
+that character from one moment to the other; it represented happily so
+much that Kate would explain on the very first chance. This left
+moreover--and that was the greatest wonder--all due margin for
+amusement at the way things happened, the monstrous oddity of their
+turning up in such a place on the very heels of their having separated
+without allusion to it. The handsome girl was thus literally in control
+of the scene by the time Merton Densher was ready to exclaim with a
+high flush, or a vivid blush--one didn't distinguish the embarrassment
+from the joy--"Why, Miss Theale: fancy!" and "Why, Miss Theale: what
+luck!"
+
+Miss Theale had meanwhile the sense that for him too, on Kate's part,
+something wonderful and unspoken was determinant; and this although,
+distinctly, his companion had no more looked at him with a hint than he
+had looked at her with a question. He had looked and he was looking
+only at Milly herself, ever so pleasantly and considerately--she scarce
+knew what to call it; but without prejudice to her consciousness, all
+the same, that women got out of predicaments better than men. The
+predicament of course wasn't definite or phraseable--and the way they
+let all phrasing pass was presently to recur to our young woman as a
+characteristic triumph of the civilised state; but she took it for
+granted, insistently, with a small private flare of passion, because
+the one thing she could think of to do for him was to show him how she
+eased him off. She would really, tired and nervous, have been much
+disconcerted, were it not that the opportunity in question had saved
+her. It was what had saved her most, what had made her, after the first
+few seconds, almost as brave for Kate as Kate was for her, had made her
+only ask herself what their friend would like of her. That he was at
+the end of three minutes, without the least complicated reference, so
+smoothly "their" friend was just the effect of their all being
+sublimely civilised. The flash in which he saw this was, for Milly,
+fairly inspiring--to that degree in fact that she was even now, on such
+a plane, yearning to be supreme. It took, no doubt, a big dose of
+inspiration to treat as not funny--or at least as not unpleasant--the
+anomaly, for Kate, that _she_ knew their gentleman, and for herself,
+that Kate was spending the morning with him; but everything continued
+to make for this after Milly had tasted of her draught. She was to
+wonder in subsequent reflection what in the world they had actually
+said, since they had made such a success of what they didn't say; the
+sweetness of the draught for the time, at any rate, was to feel success
+assured. What depended on this for Mr. Densher was all obscurity to
+her, and she perhaps but invented the image of his need as a short cut
+to service. Whatever were the facts, their perfect manners, all round,
+saw them through. The finest part of Milly's own inspiration, it may
+further be mentioned, was the quick perception that what would be of
+most service was, so to speak, her own native wood-note. She had long
+been conscious with shame for her thin blood, or at least for her poor
+economy, of her unused margin as an American girl--closely indeed as,
+in English air, the text might appear to cover the page. She still had
+reserves of spontaneity, if not of comicality; so that all this cash in
+hand could now find employment. She became as spontaneous as possible
+and as American as it might conveniently appeal to Mr. Densher, after
+his travels, to find her. She said things in the air, and yet flattered
+herself that she struck him as saying them not in the tone of agitation
+but in the tone of New York. In the tone of New York agitation was
+beautifully discounted, and she had now a sufficient view of how much
+it might accordingly help her.
+
+The help was fairly rendered before they left the place; when her
+friends presently accepted her invitation to adjourn with her to
+luncheon at her hotel, it was in the Fifth Avenue that the meal might
+have waited. Kate had never been there so straight, but Milly was at
+present taking her; and if Mr. Densher had been he had at least never
+had to come so fast. She proposed it as the natural thing--proposed it
+as the American girl; and she saw herself quickly justified by the pace
+at which she was followed. The beauty of the case was that to do it all
+she had only to appear to take Kate's hint. This had said, in its fine
+first smile, "Oh yes, our look is queer--but give me time;" and the
+American girl could give time as nobody else could. What Milly thus
+gave she therefore made them take--even if, as they might surmise, it
+was rather more than they wanted. In the porch of the museum she
+expressed her preference for a four-wheeler; they would take their
+course in that guise precisely to multiply the minutes. She was more
+than ever justified by the positive charm that her spirit imparted even
+to their use of this conveyance; and she touched her highest
+point--that is, certainly, for herself--as she ushered her companions
+into the presence of Susie. Susie was there with luncheon, with her
+return, in prospect; and nothing could now have filled her own
+consciousness more to the brim than to see this good friend take in how
+little she was abjectly anxious. The cup itself actually offered to
+this good friend might in truth well be startling, for it was composed
+beyond question of ingredients oddly mixed. She caught Susie fairly
+looking at her as if to know whether she had brought in guests to hear
+Sir Luke Strett's report. Well, it was better her companion should have
+too much than too little to wonder about; she had come out "anyway," as
+they said at home, for the interest of the thing; and interest truly
+sat in her eyes. Milly was none the less, at the sharpest crisis, a
+little sorry for her; she could of necessity extract from the odd scene
+so comparatively little of a soothing secret. She saw Mr. Densher
+suddenly popping up, but she saw nothing else that had happened. She
+saw in the same way her young friend indifferent to her young friend's
+doom, and she lacked what would explain it. The only thing to keep her
+in patience was the way, after luncheon, Kate almost, as might be said,
+made up to her. This was actually perhaps as well what most kept Milly
+herself in patience. It had in fact for our young woman a positive
+beauty--was so marked as a deviation from the handsome girl's previous
+courses. Susie had been a bore to the handsome girl, and the change was
+now suggestive. The two sat together, after they had risen from table,
+in the apartment in which they had lunched, making it thus easy for the
+other guest and his entertainer to sit in the room adjacent. This, for
+the latter personage, was the beauty; it was almost, on Kate's part,
+like a prayer to be relieved. If she honestly liked better to be
+"thrown with" Susan Shepherd than with their other friend, why that
+said practically everything. It didn't perhaps altogether say why she
+had gone out with him for the morning, but it said, as one thought,
+about as much as she could say to his face.
+
+Little by little indeed, under the vividness of Kate's behaviour, the
+probabilities fell back into their order. Merton Densher was in love,
+and Kate couldn't help it--could only be sorry and kind: wouldn't that,
+without wild flurries, cover everything? Milly at all events tried it
+as a cover, tried it hard, for the time; pulled it over her, in the
+front, the larger room, drew it up to her chin with energy. If it
+didn't, so treated, do everything for her, it did so much that she
+could herself supply the rest. She made that up by the interest of her
+great question, the question of whether, seeing him once more, with all
+that, as she called it to herself, had come and gone, her impression of
+him would be different from the impression received in New York. That
+had held her from the moment of their leaving the museum; it kept her
+company through their drive and during luncheon; and now that she was a
+quarter of an hour alone with him it became acute. She was to feel at
+this crisis that no clear, no common answer, no direct satisfaction on
+this point, was to reach her; she was to see her question itself simply
+go to pieces. She couldn't tell if he were different or not, and she
+didn't know nor care if _she_ were: these things had ceased to matter
+in the light of the only thing she did know. This was that she liked
+him, as she put it to herself, as much as ever; and if that were to
+amount to liking a new person the amusement would be but the greater.
+She had thought him at first very quiet, in spite of recovery from his
+original confusion; though even the shade of bewilderment, she yet
+perceived, had not been due to such vagueness on the subject of her
+reintensified identity as the probable sight, over there, of many
+thousands of her kind would sufficiently have justified. No, he was
+quiet, inevitably, for the first half of the time, because Milly's own
+lively line--the line of spontaneity--made everything else relative;
+and because too, so far as Kate was spontaneous, it was ever so finely
+in the air among them that the normal pitch must be kept. Afterwards,
+when they had got a little more used, as it were, to each other's
+separate felicity, he had begun to talk more, clearly bethought
+himself, at a given moment, of what _his_ natural lively line would be.
+It would be to take for granted she must wish to hear of the States,
+and to give her, in its order, everything he had seen and done there.
+He abounded, of a sudden he almost insisted; he returned, after breaks,
+to the charge; and the effect was perhaps the more odd as he gave no
+clue whatever to what he had admired, as he went, or to what he hadn't.
+He simply drenched her with his sociable story--especially during the
+time they were away from the others. She had stopped then being
+American--all to let him be English; a permission of which he took, she
+could feel, both immense and unconscious advantage. She had really
+never cared less for the "States" than at this moment; but that had
+nothing to do with the matter. It would have been the occasion of her
+life to learn about them, for nothing could put him off, and he
+ventured on no reference to what had happened for herself. It might
+have been almost as if he had known that the greatest of all these
+adventures was her doing just what she did then.
+
+It was at this point that she saw the smash of her great question as
+complete, saw that all she had to do with was the sense of being there
+with him. And there was no chill for this in what she also presently
+saw--that, however he had begun, he was now acting from a particular
+desire, determined either by new facts or new fancies, to be like
+everyone else, simplifyingly "kind" to her. He had caught on already as
+to manner--fallen into line with everyone else; and if his spirits
+verily _had_ gone up it might well be that he had thus felt himself
+lighting on the remedy for all awkwardness. Whatever he did or he
+didn't, Milly knew she should still like him--there was no alternative
+to that; but her heart could none the less sink a little on feeling how
+much his view of her was destined to have in common with--as she now
+sighed over it--_the_ view. She could have dreamed of his not having
+_the_ view, of his having something or other, if need be quite
+viewless, of his own; but he might have what he could with least
+trouble, and _the_ view wouldn't be, after all, a positive bar to her
+seeing him. The defect of it in general--if she might so ungraciously
+criticise--was that, by its sweet universality, it made relations
+rather prosaically a matter of course. It anticipated and superseded
+the--likewise sweet--operation of real affinities. It was this that was
+doubtless marked in her power to keep him now--this and her glassy
+lustre of attention to his pleasantness about the scenery in the
+Rockies. She was in truth a little measuring her success in detaining
+him by Kate's success in "standing" Susan. It would not be, if she
+could help it, Mr. Densher who should first break down. Such at least
+was one of the forms of the girl's inward tension; but beneath even
+this deep reason was a motive still finer. What she had left at home on
+going out to give it a chance was meanwhile still, was more sharply and
+actively, there. What had been at the top of her mind about it and then
+been violently pushed down--this quantity was again working up. As soon
+as their friends should go Susie would break out, and what she would
+break out upon wouldn't be--interested in that gentleman as she had
+more than once shown herself--the personal fact of Mr. Densher. Milly
+had found in her face at luncheon a feverish glitter, and it told what
+she was full of. She didn't care now for Mr. Densher's personal fact.
+Mr. Densher had risen before her only to find his proper place in her
+imagination already, of a sudden, occupied. His personal fact failed,
+so far as she was concerned, to be personal, and her companion noted
+the failure. This could only mean that she was full to the brim, of Sir
+Luke Strett, and of what she had had from him. What _had_ she had from
+him? It was indeed now working upward again that Milly would do well to
+know, though knowledge looked stiff in the light of Susie's glitter. It
+was therefore, on the whole, because Densher's young hostess was
+divided from it by so thin a partition that she continued to cling to
+the Rockies.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2, by
+Henry James
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