She had really said it so that her friend had to take it; which the
latter in fact after a moment showed herself as having done. A strange
light humour in the matter even perhaps suddenly aiding, she met it
with a certain accommodation. "Well, say one seems to see. The point
is--!" But, fairly too full now of her question, she dropped.
"The point is will it _cure?_"
"Precisely. Is it absolutely a remedy--the specific?"
"Well, I should think we might know!" Mrs. Stringham delicately
declared.
"Ah but we haven't the complaint."
"Have you never, dearest, been in love?" Susan Shepherd enquired.
"Yes, my child; but not by the doctor's direction."
Maud Manningham had spoken perforce with a break into momentary mirth,
which operated--and happily too--as a challenge to her visitor's
spirit. "Oh of course we don't ask his leave to fall. But it's
something to know he thinks it good for us."
"My dear woman," Mrs. Lowder cried, "it strikes me we know it without
him. So that when _that's_ all he has to tell us--!"
"Ah," Mrs. Stringham interposed, "it isn't 'all.' I feel Sir Luke will
have more; he won't have put me off with anything inadequate. I'm to
see him again; he as good as told me that he'll wish it. So it won't be
for nothing."
"Then what will it be for? Do you mean he has somebody of his own to
propose? Do you mean you told him nothing?"
Mrs. Stringham dealt with these questions. "I showed him I understood
him. That was all I could do. I didn't feel at liberty to be explicit;
but I felt, even though his visit so upset me, the comfort of what I
had from you night before last."
"What I spoke to you of in the carriage when we had left her with Kate?"
"You had _seen_, apparently, in three minutes. And now that he's here,
now that I've met him and had my impression of him, I feel," said Mrs.
Stringham, "that you've been magnificent."
"Of course I've been magnificent. When," asked Maud Manningham, "was I
anything else? But Milly won't be, you know, if she marries Merton
Densher."
"Oh it's always magnificent to marry the man one loves. But we're going
fast!" Mrs. Stringham woefully smiled.
"The thing _is_ to go fast if I see the case right. What had I after
all but my instinct of that on coming back with you, night before last,
to pick up Kate? I felt what I felt--I knew in my bones the man had
returned."
"That's just where, as I say, you're magnificent. But wait," said Mrs.
Stringham, "till you've seen him."
"I shall see him immediately"--Mrs. Lowder took it up with decision.
"What is then," she asked, "your impression?"
Mrs. Stringham's impression seemed lost in her doubts. "How can he ever
care for her?"
Her companion, in her companion's heavy manner, sat on it. "By being
put in the way of it."
"For God's sake then," Mrs. Stringham wailed, "_put_ him in the way!
You have him, one feels, in your hand."
Maud Lowder's eyes at this rested on her friend's. "Is that your
impression of him?"
"It's my impression, dearest, of you. You handle every one."
Mrs. Lowder's eyes still rested, and Susan Shepherd now felt, for a
wonder, not less sincere by seeing that she pleased her. But there was
a great limitation. "I don't handle Kate."
It suggested something that her visitor hadn't yet had from
her--something the sense of which made Mrs. Stringham gasp. "Do you
mean Kate cares for _him?_"
That fact the lady of Lancaster Gate had up to this moment, as we know,
enshrouded, and her friend's quick question had produced a change in
her face. She blinked--then looked at the question hard; after which,
whether she had inadvertently betrayed herself or had only reached a
decision and then been affected by the quality of Mrs. Stringham's
surprise, she accepted all results. What took place in her for Susan
Shepherd was not simply that she made the best of them, but that she
suddenly saw more in them to her purpose than she could have imagined.
A certain impatience in fact marked in her this transition: she had
been keeping back, very hard, an important truth, and wouldn't have
liked to hear that she hadn't concealed it cleverly. Susie nevertheless
felt herself pass as not a little of a fool with her for not having
thought of it. What Susie indeed, however, most thought of at present,
in the quick, new light of it, was the wonder of Kate's dissimulation.
She had time for that view while she waited for an answer to her cry.
"Kate thinks she cares. But she's mistaken. And no one knows it." These
things, distinct and responsible, were Mrs. Lowder's retort. Yet they
weren't all of it. "_You_ don't know it--that must be your line. Or
rather your line must be that you deny it utterly."
"Deny that she cares for him?"
"Deny that she so much as thinks that she does. Positively and
absolutely. Deny that you've so much as heard of it."