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.