friend: every one who had anything to give — it was true they were the fewest — made the sharpest possible bargain for it, got at least its value in return. The strangest thing, furthermore, was that this might be, in cases, a happy understanding. The worker in one connection was the worked in another; it was as broad as it was long — with the wheels of the system, as might be seen, wonderfully oiled. People could quite like each other in the midst of it, as Aunt Maud, by every appearance, quite liked Lord Mark, and as Lord Mark, it was to be hoped, liked Mrs. Lowder, since if he didn’t he was a greater brute than one could believe. She, Kate, had not yet, it was true, made out what he was doing for her — besides which the dear woman needed him, even at the most he could do, much less than she imagined; so far as all of which went, moreover, there were plenty of things on every side she had not yet made out. She believed, on the whole, in any one Aunt Maud took up; and she gave it to Milly as worth thinking of that, whatever wonderful people this young lady might meet in the land, she would meet no more extraordinary woman. There were greater celebrities by the million, and of course greater swells, but a bigger person, by Kate’s view, and a larger natural handful every way, would really be far to seek. When Milly inquired with interest if Kate’s belief in her was primarily on the lines of what Mrs. Lowder “took up,” her interlocutress could handsomely say yes, since by the same principle she believed in herself. Whom but Aunt Maud’s niece, preeminently, had Aunt Maud taken up, and who was thus more in the current, with her, of working and of being worked? “You may ask,” Kate said, “what in the world I have to give; and that indeed is just what I’m trying to learn. There must be something, for her to think she can get it out of me. She will get it — trust her; and then I shall see what it is; which I beg you to believe I should never have found out for myself.” She declined to treat any question of Milly’s own “paying” power as discussable; that Milly would pay a hundred per cent.— and even to the end, doubtless, through the nose — was just the beautiful basis on which they found themselves.
These were fine facilities, pleasantries, ironies, all these luxuries of gossip and philosophies of London and of life, and they became quickly, between the pair, the common form of talk, Milly professing herself delighted to know that something was to be done with her. If the most remarkable woman in England was to do it, so much the better, and if the most remarkable woman in England had them both in hand together, why, what could be jollier for each? When she reflected indeed a little on the oddity of her wanting two at once, Kate had the natural reply that it was exactly what showed her sincerity. She invariably gave way to feeling, and feeling had distinctly popped up in her on the advent of her girlhood’s friend. The way the cat would jump was always, in presence of anything that moved her, interesting to see; visibly enough, moreover, for a long time, it hadn’t jumped anything like so far. This, in fact, as we already know, remained the marvel for Milly Theale, who, on sight of Mrs. Lowder, found fifty links in respect to Susie absent from the chain of association. She knew so herself what she thought of Susie that she would have expected the lady of Lancaster Gate to think something quite different; the failure of which endlessly mystified her. But her mystification was the cause for her of another fine impression, inasmuch as when she went so far as to observe to Kate that Susan Shepherd — and especially Susan Shepherd emerging so uninvited from an irrelevant past — ought, by all the proprieties, simply to have bored Aunt Maud, her confidant agreed with her without a protest and abounded in the sense of her wonder. Susan Shepherd at least bored the niece — that was plain; this young woman saw nothing in her — nothing to account for anything, not even for Milly’s own indulgence: which little fact became in turn to the latter’s mind a fact of significance. It was a light on the handsome girl — representing more than merely showed — that poor Susie was simply as nought to her. This was, in a manner too, a general admonition to poor Susie’s companion, who seemed to see marked by it the direction in which she had best most look out.
It just faintly rankled in her that a person who was good enough and to spare for Milly Theale shouldn’t be good enough for another girl; though, oddly enough, she could easily have forgiven Mrs. Lowder herself the impatience. Mrs. Lowder didn’t feel it, and Kate Croy felt it with ease; yet in the end, be it added, she grasped the reason, and the reason enriched her mind. Wasn’t it sufficiently the reason that the handsome girl was, with twenty other splendid qualities, the least bit brutal too, and didn’t she suggest, as no one yet had ever done for her new friend, that there might be a wild beauty in that, and even a strange grace? Kate wasn’t brutally brutal — which Milly had hitherto benightedly supposed the only way; she wasn’t even aggressively so, but rather indifferently, defensively and, as might be said, by the habit of anticipation. She simplified in advance, was beforehand with her doubts, and knew with singular quickness what she wasn’t, as they said in New York, going to like. In that way at least people were clearly quicker in England than at home; and Milly could quite see, after a little, how such instincts might become usual in a world in which dangers abounded. There were more dangers, clearly, round about Lancaster Gate than one suspected in New York or could dream of in Boston. At all events, with more sense of them, there were more precautions, and it was a remarkable world altogether in which there could be precautions, on whatever ground, against Susie.
IX
She certainly made up with Susie directly, however, for any allowance she might have had privately to extend to tepid appreciation; since the late and long talks of these two embraced not only everything offered and suggested by the hours they spent apart, but a good deal more besides. She might be as detached as the occasion required at four o’clock in the afternoon, but she used no such freedom to any one about anything as she habitually used about everything to Susan Shepherd at midnight. All the same, it should with much less delay than this have been mentioned, she had not yet — had not, that is, at the end of six days — produced any news for her comrade to compare with an announcement made her by the latter as a result of a drive with Mrs. Lowder, for a change, in the remarkable Battersea Park. The elder friends had sociably revolved there while the younger ones followed bolder fancies in the admirable equipage appointed to Milly at the hotel — a heavier, more emblazoned, more amusing chariot than she had ever, with “stables” notoriously mismanaged, known at home; whereby, in the course of the circuit, more than once repeated, it had “come out,” as Mrs. Stringham said, that the couple at Lancaster Gate were, of all people, acquainted with Mildred’s other English friend — the gentleman, the one connected with the English newspaper (Susie hung fire a little over his name) who had been with her in New York so shortly previous to present adventures. He had been named of course in Battersea Park — else he couldn’t have been identified; and Susie had naturally, before she could produce her own share in the matter as a kind of confession, to make it plain that her allusion was to Mr. Merton Densher. This was because Milly had at first a little air of not knowing whom she meant; and the girl really kept, as well, a certain control of herself while she remarked that the case was surprising, the chance one in a thousand. They knew him, both Maud and Miss Croy knew him, she gathered too, rather well, though indeed it was not on any show of intimacy that he had happened to be mentioned. It had not been — Susie made the point — she herself who brought him in: he had in fact not been brought in at all, but only referred to as a young journalist known to Mrs. Lowder and who had lately gone to their wonderful country — Mrs. Lowder always said “your wonderful country”— on behalf of his journal. But Mrs. Stringham had taken it up — with the tips of her fingers indeed; and that was the confession: she had, without meaning any harm, recognised Mr. Densher as an acquaintance of Milly’s, though she had also pulled herself up before getting in too far. Mrs. Lowder had been struck, clearly — it wasn’t too much to say; then she also, it had rather seemed, had pulled herself up; and there had been a little moment during which each might have been keeping something from the other. “Only,” said Milly’s mate, “I luckily remembered in time that I had nothing whatever to keep — which was much simpler and nicer. I don’t know what Maud has, but there it is. She was interested, distinctly, in your knowing him — in his having met you over there with so little loss of time. But I ventured to tell her it hadn’t been so long as to make you as yet great friends. I don’t know if I was right.”
Whatever time this explanation might have taken, there
