It was odd that their one Englishman should so instantly fit; it wasn’t, however, miraculous — they surely all had often seen that, as every one said, the world was extraordinarily “small.” Undoubtedly, too, Susie had done just the plain thing in not letting his name pass. Why in the world should there be a mystery?— and what an immense one they would appear to have made if he should come back and find they had concealed their knowledge of him! “I don’t know, Susie dear,” the girl observed, “what you think I have to conceal.”
“It doesn’t matter, at a given moment,” Mrs. Stringham returned, “what you know or don’t know as to what I think; for you always find out the very next moment, and when you do find out, dearest, you never really care. Only,” she presently asked, “have you heard of him from Miss Croy?”
“Heard of Mr. Densher? Never a word. We haven’t mentioned him. Why should we?”
“That you haven’t, I understand; but that she hasn’t,” Susie opined, “may mean something.”
“May mean what?”
“Well,” Mrs. Stringham presently brought out, “I tell you all when I tell you that Maud asks me to suggest to you that it may perhaps be better for the present not to speak of him: not to speak of him to her niece, that is, unless she herself speaks to you first. But Maud thinks she won’t.”
Milly was ready to engage for anything; but in respect to the facts — as they so far possessed them — it all sounded a little complicated. “Is it because there’s anything between them?”
“No — I gather not; but Maud’s state of mind is precautionary. She’s afraid of something. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say she’s afraid of everything.”
“She’s afraid, you mean,” Milly asked, “of their — a — liking each other?”
Susie had an intense thought and then an effusion. “My dear child, we move in a labyrinth.”
“Of course we do. That’s just the fun of it!” said Milly with a strange gaiety. Then she added: “Don’t tell me that — in this for instance — there are not abysses. I want abysses.”
Her friend looked at her — it was not unfrequently the case — a little harder than the surface of the occasion seemed to require; and another person present at such times might have wondered to what inner thought of her own the good lady was trying to fit the speech. It was too much her disposition, no doubt, to treat her young companion’s words as symptoms of an imputed malady. It was none the less, however, her highest law to be light when the girl was light. She knew how to be quaint with the new quaintness — the great Boston gift; it had been, happily, her note in the magazines; and Maud Lowder, to whom it was new indeed and who had never heard anything remotely like it, quite cherished her, as a social resource, for it. It should not therefore fail her now; with it in fact one might face most things. “Ah, then let us hope we shall sound the depths — I’m prepared for the worst — of sorrow and sin! But she would like her niece — we’re not ignorant of that, are we?— to marry Lord Mark. Hasn’t she told you so?”
“Hasn’t Mrs. Lowder told me?”
“No; hasn’t Kate? It isn’t, you know, that she doesn’t know it.”
Milly had, under her comrade’s eyes, a minute of mute detachment. She had lived with Kate Croy for several days in a state of intimacy as deep as it had been sudden, and they had clearly, in talk, in many directions, proceeded to various extremities. Yet it now came over her as in a clear cold way that there was a possible account of their relations in which the quantity her new friend had told her might have figured as small, as smallest, beside the quantity she hadn’t. She couldn’t say, at any rate, whether or no she had made the point that her aunt designed her for Lord Mark: it had only sufficiently come out — which had been, moreover, eminently guessable — that she was involved in her aunt’s designs. Somehow, for Milly, brush it over nervously as she might and with whatever simplifying hand, this abrupt extrusion of Mr. Densher altered all proportions, had an effect on all values. It was fantastic of her to let it make a difference that she couldn’t in the least have defined — and she was at least, even during these instants, rather proud of being able to hide, on the spot, the difference it did make. Yet, all the same, the effect for her was, almost violently, of Mr. Densher’s having been there — having been where she had stood till now in her simplicity — before her. It would have taken but another free moment to make her see abysses — since abysses were what she wanted — in the mere circumstance of his own silence, in New York, about his English friends. There had really been in New York little time for anything; but, had she liked, Milly could have made it out for herself that he had avoided the subject of Miss Croy, and that Miss Croy was yet a subject it could never be natural to avoid. It was to be added at the same time that even if his silence had been labyrinthe — which was absurd in view of all the other things too he couldn’t possibly have spoken of — this was exactly what must suit her, since it fell under the head of the plea she had just uttered to Susie. These things, however, came and went, and it set itself up between the companions, for the occasion, in the oddest way, both that their happening all to know Mr. Densher — except indeed that Susie didn’t, but probably would,— was a fact belonging, in a world of rushing about, to one of the common orders of chance; and yet further that it was amusing — oh, awfully amusing!— to be able fondly to hope that there was “something in” its having been left to crop up with such suddenness. There seemed somehow a possibility that the ground or, as it were, the air might, in a manner, have undergone some pleasing preparation; though the question of this possibility would probably, after all, have taken some threshing out. The truth, moreover — and there they were, already, our pair, talking about it, the “truth!”— had not in fact quite cropped out. This, obviously, in view of Mrs. Lowder’s request to her old friend.
It was accordingly on Mrs. Lowder’s recommendation that nothing should be said to Kate — it was on this rich attitude of Aunt Maud’s that the idea of an interesting complication might best hope to perch; and when, in fact, after the colloquy we have reported Milly saw Kate again without mentioning any name, her silence succeeded in passing muster with her as the beginning of a new sort of fun. The sort was all the newer by reason of its containing a small element of anxiety: when she had gone in for fun before it had been with her hands a little more free. Yet it was, none the less, rather exciting to be conscious of a still sharper reason for interest in the handsome girl, as Kate continued, even now, preeminently to remain for her; and a reason — this was the great point — of which the young woman herself could have no suspicion. Twice over, thus, for two or three hours together, Milly found herself seeing Kate, quite fixing her in the light of the knowledge that it was a face on which Mr. Densher’s eyes had more or less familiarly rested and which, by the same token, had looked, rather more beautifully than less, into his own. She pulled herself up indeed with the thought that it had inevitably looked, as beautifully as one would, into thousands of faces in which one might one’s self never trace it; but just the odd result of the thought was to intensify for the girl that side of her friend which she had doubtless already been more prepared than she quite knew to think of as the “other,” the not wholly calculable. It was fantastic, and Milly was aware of this; but the other side was what had, of a sudden, been turned straight towards her by the show of Mr. Densher’s propinquity. She hadn’t the excuse of knowing it for Kate’s own, since nothing whatever as yet proved it particularly to be such. Never mind; it was with this other side now fully presented that Kate came and went, kissed her for greeting and for parting, talked, as usual, of everything but — as it had so abruptly become for Milly — the thing. Our young woman, it is true, would doubtless not have tasted so sharply a difference in this pair of occasions had she not been tasting so peculiarly her own possible betrayals. What happened was that afterwards, on separation, she wondered if the matter
