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."