the edge of a great darkness. She should never know how Kate truly felt about anything such a one as Milly Theale should give her to feel. Kate would never — and not from ill-will, nor from duplicity, but from a sort of failure of common terms — reduce it to such a one’s comprehension or put it within her convenience.
It was as such a one, therefore, that, for three or four days more, Milly watched Kate as just such another; and it was presently as such a one that she threw herself into their promised visit, at last achieved, to Chelsea, the quarter of the famous Carlyle, the field of exercise of his ghost, his votaries, and the residence of “poor Marian,” so often referred to and actually a somewhat incongruous spirit there. With our young woman’s first view of poor Marian everything gave way but the sense of how, in England, apparently, the social situation of sisters could be opposed, how common ground, for a place in the world, could quite fail them: a state of things sagely perceived to be involved in an hierarchical, an aristocratic order. Just whereabouts in the order Mrs. Lowder had established her niece was a question not wholly void, as yet, no doubt, of ambiguity — though Milly was withal sure Lord Mark could exactly have fixed the point if he would, fixing it at the same time for Aunt Maud herself; but it was clear that Mrs. Condrip was, as might have been said, in quite another geography. She would not, in short, have been to be found on the same social map, and it was as if her visitors had turned over page after page together before the final relief of their benevolent “Here!” The interval was bridged, of course, but the bridge, verily, was needed, and the impression left Milly to wonder whether, in the general connection, it were of bridges or of intervals that the spirit not locally disciplined would find itself most conscious. It was as if at home, by contrast, there were neither — neither the difference itself, from position to position, nor, on either side, and particularly on one, the awfully good manner, the conscious sinking of a consciousness, that made up for it. The conscious sinking, at all events, and the awfully good manner, the difference, the bridge, the interval, the skipped leaves of the social atlas — these, it was to be confessed, had a little, for our young lady, in default of stouter stuff, to work themselves into the light literary legend — a mixed, wandering echo of Trollope, of Thackeray, perhaps mostly of Dickens — under favour of which her pilgrimage had so much appealed. She could relate to Susie later on, late the same evening, that the legend, before she had done with it, had run clear, that the adored author of The Newcomes, in fine, had been on the whole the note: the picture lacking thus more than she had hoped, or rather perhaps showing less than she had feared, a certain possibility of Pickwickian outline. She explained how she meant by this that Mrs. Condrip had not altogether proved another Mrs. Nickleby, nor even — for she might have proved almost anything, from the way poor worried Kate had spoken — a widowed and aggravated Mrs. Micawber.
Mrs. Stringham, in the midnight conference, intimated rather yearningly that, however the event might have turned, the side of English life such experiences opened to Milly were just those she herself seemed “booked”— as they were all, roundabout her now, always saying — to miss: she had begun to have a little, for her fellow-observer, these moments of fanciful reaction — reaction in which she was once more all Susan Shepherd — against the high sphere of colder conventions into which her overwhelming connection with Maud Manningham had rapt her. Milly never lost sight, for long, of the Susan Shepherd side of her, and was always there to meet it when it came up and vaguely, tenderly, impatiently to pat it, abounding in the assurance that they would still provide for it. They had, however, to-night, another matter in hand; which proved to be presently, on the girl’s part, in respect to her hour of Chelsea, the revelation that Mrs. Condrip, taking a few minutes when Kate was away with one of the children, in bed upstairs for some small complaint, had suddenly, without its being in the least “led up to,” broken ground on the subject of Mr. Densher, mentioned him with impatience as a person in love with her sister. “She wished me, if I cared for Kate, to know,” Milly said —“for it would be quite too dreadful, and one might do something.”
Susie wondered. “Prevent anything coming of it? That’s easily said. Do what?”
Milly had a dim smile. “I think that what she would like is that I should come a good deal to see her about it.”
“And doesn’t she suppose you’ve anything else to do?”
The girl had by this time clearly made it out. “Nothing but to admire and make much of her sister — whom she doesn’t, however, herself in the least understand — and give up one’s time, and everything else, to it.” It struck the elder friend that she spoke with an almost unprecedented approach to sharpness; as if Mrs. Condrip had been rather specially disconcerting. Never yet so much as just of late had Mrs. Stringham seen her companion as exalted, and by the very play of something within, into a vague golden air that left irritation below. That was the great thing with Milly — it was her characteristic poetry; or at least it was Susan Shepherd’s. “But she made a point,” the former continued, “of my keeping what she says from Kate. I’m not to mention that she has spoken.”
“And why,” Mrs. Stringham presently asked, “is Mr. Densher so dreadful?”
Milly had, she thought, an hesitation — something that suggested a fuller talk with Mrs. Condrip than she inclined perhaps to report. “It isn’t so much he himself.” Then the girl spoke a little as for the romance of it; one could never tell, with her, where romance would come in. “It’s the state of his fortunes.”
“And is that very bad?”
“He has no ‘private means,’ and no prospect of any. He has no income, and no ability, according to Mrs. Condrip, to make one. He’s as poor, she calls it, as ‘poverty,’ and she says she knows what that is.”
Again Mrs. Stringham considered, and it presently produced something. “But isn’t he brilliantly clever?”
Milly had also then an instant that was not quite fruitless. “I haven’t the least idea.”
To which, for the time, Susie only answered “Oh!”— though by the end of a minute she had followed it with a slightly musing “I see”; and that in turn with: “It’s quite what Maud Lowder thinks.”
“That he’ll never do anything?”
“No — quite the contrary: that he’s exceptionally able.”
“Oh yes; I know”— Milly had again, in reference to what her friend had already told her of this, her little tone of a moment before. “But Mrs. Condrip’s own great point is that Aunt Maud herself won’t hear of any such person. Mr. Densher, she holds that’s the way, at any rate, it was explained to me — won’t ever be either a public man or a rich man. If he were public she’d be willing, as I understand, to help him; if he were rich — without being anything else — she’d do her best to swallow him. As it is, she taboos him.”
“In short,” said Mrs. Stringham as with a private purpose, “she told you, the sister, all about it. But Mrs. Lowder likes him,” she added.
“Mrs. Condrip didn’t tell me that.”
“Well, she does, all the same, my dear, extremely.”
“Then there it is!” On which, with a drop and one of those sudden, slightly sighing surrenders to a vague reflux and a general fatigue that had recently more than once marked themselves for her companion, Milly turned away. Yet the matter was not left so, that night, between them, albeit neither perhaps could afterwards have said which had first come back to it. Milly’s own nearest approach, at least, for a little, to doing so, was to remark that they appeared all — every one they saw — to think tremendously of money. This prompted in Susie a laugh, not untender, the innocent meaning of which was that it came, as a subject for indifference, money did, easier
