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.