"My dear," the girl presently said, "I don't 'want,' as I assure you,
anything. Still," she added, "I _am_ living. Oh yes, I'm living."
It put them again face to face, but it had wound Mrs. Stringham up. "So
am I then, you'll see!"--she spoke with the note of her recovery. Yet
it was her wisdom now--meaning by it as much as she did--not to say
more than that. She had risen by Milly's aid to a certain command of
what was before them; the ten minutes of their talk had in fact made
her more distinctly aware of the presence in her mind of a new idea. It
was really perhaps an old idea with a new value; it had at all events
begun during the last hour, though at first but feebly, to shine with a
special light. That was because in the morning darkness had so suddenly
descended--a sufficient shade of night to bring out the power of a
star. The dusk might be thick yet, but the sky had comparatively
cleared; and Susan Shepherd's star from this time on continued to
twinkle for her. It was for the moment, after her passage with Milly,
the one spark left in the heavens. She recognised, as she continued to
watch it, that it had really been set there by Sir Luke Strett's visit
and that the impressions immediately following had done no more than
fix it. Milly's reappearance with Mr. Densher at her heels--or, so
oddly perhaps, at Miss Croy's heels, Miss Croy being at Milly's--had
contributed to this effect, though it was only with the lapse of the
greater obscurity that Susie made that out. The obscurity had reigned
during the hour of their friends' visit, faintly clearing indeed while,
in one of the rooms, Kate Croy's remarkable advance to her intensified
the fact that Milly and the young man were conjoined in the other. If
it hadn't acquired on the spot all the intensity of which it was
capable, this was because the poor lady still sat in her primary gloom,
the gloom the great benignant doctor had practically left behind him.
The intensity the circumstance in question _might_ wear to the informed
imagination would have been sufficiently revealed for us, no doubt--and
with other things to our purpose--in two or three of those confidential
passages with Mrs. Lowder that she now permitted herself. She hadn't
yet been so glad that she believed in her old friend; for if she hadn't
had, at such a pass, somebody or other to believe in she should
certainly have stumbled by the way. Discretion had ceased to consist of
silence; silence was gross and thick, whereas wisdom should taper,
however tremulously, to a point. She betook herself to Lancaster Gate
the morning after the colloquy just noted; and there, in Maud
Manningham's own sanctum, she gradually found relief in giving an
account of herself. An account of herself was one of the things that
she had long been in the habit of expecting herself regularly to
give--the regularity depending of course much on such tests of merit as
might, by laws beyond her control, rise in her path. She never spared
herself in short a proper sharpness of conception of how she had
behaved, and it was a statement that she for the most part found
herself able to make. What had happened at present was that nothing, as
she felt, was left of her to report to; she was all too sunk in the
inevitable and the abysmal. To give an account of herself she must give
it to somebody else, and her first instalment of it to her hostess was
that she must please let her cry. She couldn't cry, with Milly in
observation, at the hotel, which she had accordingly left for that
purpose; and the power happily came to her with the good opportunity.
She cried and cried at first--she confined herself to that; it was for
the time the best statement of her business. Mrs. Lowder moreover
intelligently took it as such, though knocking off a note or two more,
as she said, while Susie sat near her table. She could resist the
contagion of tears, but her patience did justice to her visitor's most
vivid plea for it. "I shall never be able, you know, to cry again--at
least not ever with _her;_ so I must take it out when I can. Even if
she does herself it won't be for me to give away; for what would that
be but a confession of despair? I'm not with her for that--I'm with her
to be regularly sublime. Besides, Milly won't cry herself."
"I'm sure I hope," said Mrs. Lowder, "that she won't have occasion to."
"She won't even if she does have occasion. She won't shed a tear.
There's something that will prevent her."
"Oh!" said Mrs. Lowder.
"Yes, her pride," Mrs. Stringham explained in spite of her friend's
doubt, and it was with this that her communication took consistent
form. It had never been pride, Maud Manningham had hinted, that kept
_her_ from crying when other things made for it; it had only been that
these same things, at such times, made still more for business,
arrangements, correspondence, the ringing of bells, the marshalling of
servants, the taking of decisions. "I might be crying now," she said,
"if I weren't writing letters"--and this quite without harshness for
her anxious companion, to whom she allowed just the administrative
margin for difference. She had interrupted her no more than she would
have interrupted the piano-tuner. It gave poor Susie time; and when
Mrs. Lowder, to save appearances and catch the post, had, with her
addressed and stamped notes, met at the door of the room the footman
summoned by the pressure of a knob, the facts of the case were
sufficiently ready for her. It took but two or three, however, given
their importance, to lay the ground for the great one--Mrs. Stringham's
interview of the day before with Sir Luke, who had wished to see her
about Milly.
"He had wished it himself?"
"I think he was glad of it. Clearly indeed he was. He stayed a quarter
of an hour. I could see that for _him_ it was long. He's interested,"
said Mrs. Stringham.
"Do you mean in her case?"
"He says it _isn't_ a case."
"What then is it?"
"It isn't, at least," Mrs. Stringham explained, "the case she believed
it to be--thought it at any rate _might_ be--when, without my
knowledge, she went to see him. She went because there was something
she was afraid of, and he examined her thoroughly--he has made sure.
She's wrong--she hasn't what she thought."
"And what did she think?" Mrs. Lowder demanded.
"He didn't tell me."
"And you didn't ask?"
"I asked nothing," said poor Susie--"I only took what he gave me. He
gave me no more than he had to--he was beautiful," she went on. "He
_is_, thank God, interested."
"He must have been interested in _you_, dear," Maud Manningham observed
with kindness.
Her visitor met it with candour. "Yes, love, I think he _is_. I mean
that he sees what he can do with me."