"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.