The idea of the National Gallery had been with her from the moment of
her hearing from Sir Luke Strett about his hour of coming. It had been
in her mind as a place so meagrely visited, as one of the places that
had seemed at home one of the attractions of Europe and one of its
highest aids to culture, but that--the old story--the typical frivolous
always ended by sacrificing to vulgar pleasures. She had had perfectly,
at those whimsical moments on the Brünig, the half-shamed sense of
turning her back on such opportunities for real improvement as had
figured to her, from of old, in connection with the continental tour,
under the general head of "pictures and things"; and now she knew for
what she had done so. The plea had been explicit--she had done so for
life, as opposed to learning; the upshot of which had been that life
was now beautifully provided for. In spite of those few dips and dashes
into the many-coloured stream of history for which of late Kate Croy
had helped her to find time, there were possible great chances she had
neglected, possible great moments she should, save for to-day, have all
but missed. She might still, she had felt, overtake one or two of them
among the Titians and the Turners; she had been honestly nursing the
hour, and, once she was in the benignant halls, her faith knew itself
justified. It was the air she wanted and the world she would now
exclusively choose; the quiet chambers, nobly overwhelming, rich but
slightly veiled, opened out round her and made her presently say "If I
could lose myself _here!"_ There were people, people in plenty, but,
admirably, no personal question. It was immense, outside, the personal
question; but she had blissfully left it outside, and the nearest it
came, for a quarter of an hour, to glimmering again into sight was when
she watched for a little one of the more earnest of the lady-copyists.
Two or three in particular, spectacled, aproned, absorbed, engaged her
sympathy to an absurd extent, seemed to show her for the time the right
way to live. She should have been a lady copyist--it met so the case.
The case was the case of escape, of living under water, of being at
once impersonal and firm. There it was before one--one had only to
stick and stick.
Milly yielded to this charm till she was almost ashamed; she watched
the lady-copyists till she found herself wondering what would be
thought by others of a young woman, of adequate aspect, who should
appear to regard them as the pride of the place. She would have liked
to talk to them, to get, as it figured to her, into their lives, and
was deterred but by the fact that she didn't quite see herself as
purchasing imitations and yet feared she might excite the expectation
of purchase. She really knew before long that what held her was the
mere refuge, that something within her was after all too weak for the
Turners and Titians. They joined hands about her in a circle too vast,
though a circle that a year before she would only have desired to
trace. They were truly for the larger, not for the smaller life, the
life of which the actual pitch, for example, was an interest, the
interest of compassion, in misguided efforts. She marked absurdly her
little stations, blinking, in her shrinkage of curiosity, at the
glorious walls, yet keeping an eye on vistas and approaches, so that
she shouldn't be flagrantly caught. The vistas and approaches drew her
in this way from room to room, and she had been through many parts of
the show, as she supposed, when she sat down to rest. There were chairs
in scant clusters, places from which one could gaze. Milly indeed at
present fixed her eyes more than elsewhere on the appearance, first,
that she couldn't quite, after all, have accounted to an examiner for
the order of her "schools," and then on that of her being more tired
than she had meant, in spite of her having been so much less
intelligent. They found, her eyes, it should be added, other occupation
as well, which she let them freely follow: they rested largely, in her
vagueness, on the vagueness of other visitors; they attached themselves
in especial, with mixed results, to the surprising stream of her
compatriots. She was struck with the circumstance that the great
museum, early in August, was haunted with these pilgrims, as also with
that of her knowing them from afar, marking them easily, each and all,
and recognising not less promptly that they had ever new lights for
her--new lights on their own darkness. She gave herself up at last, and
it was a consummation like another: what she should have come to the
National Gallery for to-day would be to watch the copyists and reckon
the Baedekers. That perhaps was the moral of a menaced state of
health--that one would sit in public places and count the Americans. It
passed the time in a manner; but it seemed already the second line of
defence, and this notwithstanding the pattern, so unmistakable, of her
country-folk. They were cut out as by scissors, coloured, labelled,
mounted; but their relation to her failed to act--they somehow did
nothing for her. Partly, no doubt, they didn't so much as notice or
know her, didn't even recognise their community of collapse with her,
the sign on her, as she sat there, that for her too Europe was "tough."
It came to her idly thus--for her humour could still play--that she
didn't seem then the same success with them as with the inhabitants of
London, who had taken her up on scarce more of an acquaintance. She
could wonder if they would be different should she go back with that
glamour attached; and she could also wonder, if it came to that,
whether she should ever go back. Her friends straggled past, at any
rate, in all the vividness of their absent criticism, and she had even
at last the sense of taking a mean advantage. There was a finer
instant, however, at which three ladies, clearly a mother and
daughters, had paused before her under compulsion of a comment
apparently just uttered by one of them and referring to some object on
the other side of the room. Milly had her back to the object, but her
face very much to her young compatriot, the one who had spoken and in
whose look she perceived a certain gloom of recognition. Recognition,
for that matter, sat confessedly in her own eyes: she _knew_ the three,
generically, as easily as a schoolboy with a crib in his lap would know
the answer in class; she felt, like the schoolboy, guilty
enough--questioned, as honour went, as to her right so to possess, to
dispossess, people who hadn't consciously provoked her. She would have
been able to say where they lived, and how, had the place and the way
been but amenable to the positive; she bent tenderly, in imagination,
over marital, paternal Mr. Whatever-he-was, at home, eternally named,
with all the honours and placidities, but eternally unseen and existing
only as some one who could be financially heard from. The mother, the
puffed and composed whiteness of whose hair had no relation to her
apparent age, showed a countenance almost chemically clean and dry; her
companions wore an air of vague resentment humanised by fatigue; and
the three were equally adorned with short cloaks of coloured cloth
surmounted by little tartan hoods. The tartans were doubtless
conceivable as different, but the cloaks, curiously, only thinkable as
one. "Handsome? Well, if you choose to say so." It was the mother who
had spoken, who herself added, after a pause during which Milly took
the reference as to a picture: "In the English style." The three pair
of eyes had converged, and their possessors had for an instant rested,
with the effect of a drop of the subject, on this last
characterisation--with that, too, of a gloom not less mute in one of
the daughters than murmured in the other. Milly's heart went out to
them while they turned their backs; she said to herself that they ought
to have known her, that there was something between them they might
have beautifully put together. But she had lost _them_ also--they were
cold; they left her in her weak wonder as to what they had been looking
at. The "handsome" disposed her to turn--all the more that the "English
style" would be the English school, which she liked; only she saw,
before moving, by the array on the side facing her, that she was in
fact among small Dutch pictures. The action of this was again
appreciable--the dim surmise that it wouldn't then be by a picture that
the spring in the three ladies had been pressed. It was at all events
time she should go, and she turned as she got on her feet. She had had
behind her one of the entrances and various visitors who had come in
while she sat, visitors single and in pairs--by one of the former of
whom she felt her eyes suddenly held.
This was a gentleman in the middle of the place, a gentleman who had
removed his hat and was for a moment, while he glanced, absently, as
she could see, at the top tier of the collection, tapping his forehead
with his pocket-handkerchief. The occupation held him long enough to
give Milly time to take for granted--and a few seconds sufficed--that
his face was the object just observed by her friends. This could only
have been because she concurred in their tribute, even qualified, and
indeed "the English style" of the gentleman--perhaps by instant
contrast to the American--was what had had the arresting power. This
arresting power, at the same time--and that was the marvel--had already
sharpened almost to pain, for in the very act of judging the bared head
with detachment she felt herself shaken by a knowledge of it. It was
Merton Densher's own, and he was standing there, standing long enough
unconscious for her to fix him and then hesitate. These successions
were swift, so that she could still ask herself in freedom if she had
best let him see her. She could still reply to that that she shouldn't
like him to catch her in the effort to prevent this; and she might
further have decided that he was too preoccupied to see anything had
not a perception intervened that surpassed the first in violence. She
was unable to think afterwards how long she had looked at him before
knowing herself as otherwise looked at; all she was coherently to put
together was that she had had a second recognition without his having
noticed her. The source of this latter shock was nobody less than Kate
Croy--Kate Croy who was suddenly also in the line of vision and whose
eyes met her eyes at their next movement. Kate was but two yards
off--Mr. Densher wasn't alone. Kate's face specifically said so, for
after a stare as blank at first as Milly's it broke into a far smile.
That was what, wonderfully--in addition to the marvel of their
meeting--passed from her for Milly; the instant reduction to easy terms
of the fact of their being there, the two young women, together. It was
perhaps only afterwards that the girl fully felt the connection between
this touch and her already established conviction that Kate was a
prodigious person; yet on the spot she none the less, in a degree, knew
herself handled and again, as she had been the night before, dealt
with--absolutely even dealt with for her greater pleasure. A minute in
fine hadn't elapsed before Kate had somehow made her provisionally take
everything as natural. The provisional was just the charm--acquiring
that character from one moment to the other; it represented happily so
much that Kate would explain on the very first chance. This left
moreover--and that was the greatest wonder--all due margin for
amusement at the way things happened, the monstrous oddity of their
turning up in such a place on the very heels of their having separated
without allusion to it. The handsome girl was thus literally in control
of the scene by the time Merton Densher was ready to exclaim with a
high flush, or a vivid blush--one didn't distinguish the embarrassment
from the joy--"Why, Miss Theale: fancy!" and "Why, Miss Theale: what
luck!"
Miss Theale had meanwhile the sense that for him too, on Kate's part,
something wonderful and unspoken was determinant; and this although,
distinctly, his companion had no more looked at him with a hint than he
had looked at her with a question. He had looked and he was looking
only at Milly herself, ever so pleasantly and considerately--she scarce
knew what to call it; but without prejudice to her consciousness, all
the same, that women got out of predicaments better than men. The
predicament of course wasn't definite or phraseable--and the way they
let all phrasing pass was presently to recur to our young woman as a
characteristic triumph of the civilised state; but she took it for
granted, insistently, with a small private flare of passion, because
the one thing she could think of to do for him was to show him how she
eased him off. She would really, tired and nervous, have been much
disconcerted, were it not that the opportunity in question had saved
her. It was what had saved her most, what had made her, after the first
few seconds, almost as brave for Kate as Kate was for her, had made her
only ask herself what their friend would like of her. That he was at
the end of three minutes, without the least complicated reference, so
smoothly "their" friend was just the effect of their all being
sublimely civilised. The flash in which he saw this was, for Milly,
fairly inspiring--to that degree in fact that she was even now, on such
a plane, yearning to be supreme. It took, no doubt, a big dose of
inspiration to treat as not funny--or at least as not unpleasant--the
anomaly, for Kate, that _she_ knew their gentleman, and for herself,
that Kate was spending the morning with him; but everything continued
to make for this after Milly had tasted of her draught. She was to
wonder in subsequent reflection what in the world they had actually
said, since they had made such a success of what they didn't say; the
sweetness of the draught for the time, at any rate, was to feel success
assured. What depended on this for Mr. Densher was all obscurity to
her, and she perhaps but invented the image of his need as a short cut
to service. Whatever were the facts, their perfect manners, all round,
saw them through. The finest part of Milly's own inspiration, it may
further be mentioned, was the quick perception that what would be of
most service was, so to speak, her own native wood-note. She had long
been conscious with shame for her thin blood, or at least for her poor
economy, of her unused margin as an American girl--closely indeed as,
in English air, the text might appear to cover the page. She still had
reserves of spontaneity, if not of comicality; so that all this cash in
hand could now find employment. She became as spontaneous as possible
and as American as it might conveniently appeal to Mr. Densher, after
his travels, to find her. She said things in the air, and yet flattered
herself that she struck him as saying them not in the tone of agitation
but in the tone of New York. In the tone of New York agitation was
beautifully discounted, and she had now a sufficient view of how much
it might accordingly help her.
The help was fairly rendered before they left the place; when her
friends presently accepted her invitation to adjourn with her to
luncheon at her hotel, it was in the Fifth Avenue that the meal might
have waited. Kate had never been there so straight, but Milly was at
present taking her; and if Mr. Densher had been he had at least never
had to come so fast. She proposed it as the natural thing--proposed it
as the American girl; and she saw herself quickly justified by the pace
at which she was followed. The beauty of the case was that to do it all
she had only to appear to take Kate's hint. This had said, in its fine
first smile, "Oh yes, our look is queer--but give me time;" and the
American girl could give time as nobody else could. What Milly thus
gave she therefore made them take--even if, as they might surmise, it
was rather more than they wanted. In the porch of the museum she
expressed her preference for a four-wheeler; they would take their
course in that guise precisely to multiply the minutes. She was more
than ever justified by the positive charm that her spirit imparted even
to their use of this conveyance; and she touched her highest
point--that is, certainly, for herself--as she ushered her companions
into the presence of Susie. Susie was there with luncheon, with her
return, in prospect; and nothing could now have filled her own
consciousness more to the brim than to see this good friend take in how
little she was abjectly anxious. The cup itself actually offered to
this good friend might in truth well be startling, for it was composed
beyond question of ingredients oddly mixed. She caught Susie fairly
looking at her as if to know whether she had brought in guests to hear
Sir Luke Strett's report. Well, it was better her companion should have
too much than too little to wonder about; she had come out "anyway," as
they said at home, for the interest of the thing; and interest truly
sat in her eyes. Milly was none the less, at the sharpest crisis, a
little sorry for her; she could of necessity extract from the odd scene
so comparatively little of a soothing secret. She saw Mr. Densher
suddenly popping up, but she saw nothing else that had happened. She
saw in the same way her young friend indifferent to her young friend's
doom, and she lacked what would explain it. The only thing to keep her
in patience was the way, after luncheon, Kate almost, as might be said,
made up to her. This was actually perhaps as well what most kept Milly
herself in patience. It had in fact for our young woman a positive
beauty--was so marked as a deviation from the handsome girl's previous
courses. Susie had been a bore to the handsome girl, and the change was
now suggestive. The two sat together, after they had risen from table,
in the apartment in which they had lunched, making it thus easy for the
other guest and his entertainer to sit in the room adjacent. This, for
the latter personage, was the beauty; it was almost, on Kate's part,
like a prayer to be relieved. If she honestly liked better to be
"thrown with" Susan Shepherd than with their other friend, why that
said practically everything. It didn't perhaps altogether say why she
had gone out with him for the morning, but it said, as one thought,
about as much as she could say to his face.
Little by little indeed, under the vividness of Kate's behaviour, the
probabilities fell back into their order. Merton Densher was in love,
and Kate couldn't help it--could only be sorry and kind: wouldn't that,
without wild flurries, cover everything? Milly at all events tried it
as a cover, tried it hard, for the time; pulled it over her, in the
front, the larger room, drew it up to her chin with energy. If it
didn't, so treated, do everything for her, it did so much that she
could herself supply the rest. She made that up by the interest of her
great question, the question of whether, seeing him once more, with all
that, as she called it to herself, had come and gone, her impression of
him would be different from the impression received in New York. That
had held her from the moment of their leaving the museum; it kept her
company through their drive and during luncheon; and now that she was a
quarter of an hour alone with him it became acute. She was to feel at
this crisis that no clear, no common answer, no direct satisfaction on
this point, was to reach her; she was to see her question itself simply
go to pieces. She couldn't tell if he were different or not, and she
didn't know nor care if _she_ were: these things had ceased to matter
in the light of the only thing she did know. This was that she liked
him, as she put it to herself, as much as ever; and if that were to
amount to liking a new person the amusement would be but the greater.
She had thought him at first very quiet, in spite of recovery from his
original confusion; though even the shade of bewilderment, she yet
perceived, had not been due to such vagueness on the subject of her
reintensified identity as the probable sight, over there, of many
thousands of her kind would sufficiently have justified. No, he was
quiet, inevitably, for the first half of the time, because Milly's own
lively line--the line of spontaneity--made everything else relative;
and because too, so far as Kate was spontaneous, it was ever so finely
in the air among them that the normal pitch must be kept. Afterwards,
when they had got a little more used, as it were, to each other's
separate felicity, he had begun to talk more, clearly bethought
himself, at a given moment, of what _his_ natural lively line would be.
It would be to take for granted she must wish to hear of the States,
and to give her, in its order, everything he had seen and done there.
He abounded, of a sudden he almost insisted; he returned, after breaks,
to the charge; and the effect was perhaps the more odd as he gave no
clue whatever to what he had admired, as he went, or to what he hadn't.
He simply drenched her with his sociable story--especially during the
time they were away from the others. She had stopped then being
American--all to let him be English; a permission of which he took, she
could feel, both immense and unconscious advantage. She had really
never cared less for the "States" than at this moment; but that had
nothing to do with the matter. It would have been the occasion of her
life to learn about them, for nothing could put him off, and he
ventured on no reference to what had happened for herself. It might
have been almost as if he had known that the greatest of all these
adventures was her doing just what she did then.
It was at this point that she saw the smash of her great question as
complete, saw that all she had to do with was the sense of being there
with him. And there was no chill for this in what she also presently
saw--that, however he had begun, he was now acting from a particular
desire, determined either by new facts or new fancies, to be like
everyone else, simplifyingly "kind" to her. He had caught on already as
to manner--fallen into line with everyone else; and if his spirits
verily _had_ gone up it might well be that he had thus felt himself
lighting on the remedy for all awkwardness. Whatever he did or he
didn't, Milly knew she should still like him--there was no alternative
to that; but her heart could none the less sink a little on feeling how
much his view of her was destined to have in common with--as she now
sighed over it--_the_ view. She could have dreamed of his not having
_the_ view, of his having something or other, if need be quite
viewless, of his own; but he might have what he could with least
trouble, and _the_ view wouldn't be, after all, a positive bar to her
seeing him. The defect of it in general--if she might so ungraciously
criticise--was that, by its sweet universality, it made relations
rather prosaically a matter of course. It anticipated and superseded
the--likewise sweet--operation of real affinities. It was this that was
doubtless marked in her power to keep him now--this and her glassy
lustre of attention to his pleasantness about the scenery in the
Rockies. She was in truth a little measuring her success in detaining
him by Kate's success in "standing" Susan. It would not be, if she
could help it, Mr. Densher who should first break down. Such at least
was one of the forms of the girl's inward tension; but beneath even
this deep reason was a motive still finer. What she had left at home on
going out to give it a chance was meanwhile still, was more sharply and
actively, there. What had been at the top of her mind about it and then
been violently pushed down--this quantity was again working up. As soon
as their friends should go Susie would break out, and what she would
break out upon wouldn't be--interested in that gentleman as she had
more than once shown herself--the personal fact of Mr. Densher. Milly
had found in her face at luncheon a feverish glitter, and it told what
she was full of. She didn't care now for Mr. Densher's personal fact.
Mr. Densher had risen before her only to find his proper place in her
imagination already, of a sudden, occupied. His personal fact failed,
so far as she was concerned, to be personal, and her companion noted
the failure. This could only mean that she was full to the brim, of Sir
Luke Strett, and of what she had had from him. What _had_ she had from
him? It was indeed now working upward again that Milly would do well to
know, though knowledge looked stiff in the light of Susie's glitter. It
was therefore, on the whole, because Densher's young hostess was
divided from it by so thin a partition that she continued to cling to
the Rockies.