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.