should ever have with him. It was perhaps as good a moment as she should have with any one, or have in any connection whatever. “I mean that everything this afternoon has been too beautiful, and that perhaps everything together will never be so right again. I’m very glad therefore you’ve been a part of it.”
Though he still didn’t understand her he was as nice as if he had; he didn’t ask for insistence, and that was just a part of his looking after her. He simply protected her now from herself, and there was a world of practice in it. “Oh, we must talk about these things!”
Ah, they had already done that, she knew, as much as she ever would; and she was shaking her head at her pale sister the next moment with a world, on her side, of slowness. “I wish I could see the resemblance. Of course her complexion’s green,” she laughed; “but mine’s several shades greener.”
“It’s down to the very hands,” said Lord Mark.
“Her hands are large,” Milly went on, “but mine are larger. Mine are huge.”
“Oh, you go her, all round, ‘one better’— which is just what I said. But you’re a pair. You must surely catch it,” he added as if it were important to his character as a serious man not to appear to have invented his plea.
“I don’t know one never knows one’s self. It’s a funny fancy, and I don’t imagine it would have occurred ——”
“I see it has occurred”— he has already taken her up. She had her back, as she faced the picture, to one of the doors of the room, which was open, and on her turning, as he spoke, she saw that they were in the presence of three other persons, also, as appeared, interested inquirers. Kate Croy was one of these; Lord Mark had just become aware of her, and she, all arrested, had immediately seen, and made the best of it, that she was far from being first in the field. She had brought a lady and a gentleman to whom she wished to show what Lord Mark was showing Milly, and he took her straightway as a reinforcement. Kate herself had spoken, however, before he had had time to tell her so.
“You had noticed too?”— she smiled at him without looking at Milly. “Then I’m not original — which one always hopes one has been. But the likeness is so great.” And now she looked at Milly — for whom again it was, all round indeed, kind, kind eyes. “Yes, there you are, my dear, if you want to know. And you’re superb.” She took now but a glance at the picture, though it was enough to make her question to her friends not too straight. “Isn’t she superb?”
“I brought Miss Theale,” Lord Mark explained to the latter, “quite off my own bat.”
“I wanted Lady Aldershaw,” Kate continued to Milly, “to see for herself.”
“Les grands esprits se rencontrent!“ laughed her attendant gentleman, a high, but slightly stooping, shambling and wavering person, who represented urbanity by the liberal aid of certain prominent front teeth and whom Milly vaguely took for some sort of great man.
Lady Aldershaw meanwhile looked at Milly quite as if Milly had been the Bronzino and the Bronzino only Milly. “Superb, superb. Of course I had noticed you. It is wonderful,” she went on with her back to the picture, but with some other eagerness which Milly felt gathering, directing her motions now. It was enough — they were introduced, and she was saying “I wonder if you could give us the pleasure of coming ——” She was not fresh, for she was not young, even though she denied at every pore that she was old; but she was vivid and much bejewelled for the midsummer daylight; and she was all in the palest pinks and blues. She didn’t think, at this pass, that she could “come” anywhere — Milly didn’t; and she already knew that somehow Lord Mark was saving her from the question. He had interposed, taking the words out of the lady’s mouth and not caring at all if the lady minded. That was clearly the right way to treat her — at least for him; as she had only dropped, smiling, and then turned away with him. She had been dealt with — it would have done an enemy good. The gentleman still stood, a little helpless, addressing himself to the intention of urbanity as if it were a large loud whistle; he had been signing sympathy, in his way, while the lady made her overture; and Milly had, in this light, soon arrived at their identity. They were Lord and Lady Aldershaw, and the wife was the clever one. A minute or two later the situation had changed, and she knew it afterwards to have been by the subtle operation of Kate. She was herself saying that she was afraid she must go now if Susie could be found; but she was sitting down on the nearest seat to say it. The prospect, through opened doors, stretched before her into other rooms, down the vista of which Lord Mark was strolling with Lady Aldershaw, who, close to him and much intent, seemed to show from behind as peculiarly expert. Lord Aldershaw, for his part, had been left in the middle of the room, while Kate, with her back to him, was standing before her with much sweetness of manner. The sweetness was all for her; she had the sense of the poor gentleman’s having somehow been handled as Lord Mark had handled his wife. He dangled there, he shambled a little; then he bethought himself of the Bronzino, before which, with his eyeglass, he hovered. It drew from him an odd, vague sound, not wholly distinct from a grunt, and a “Humph — most remarkable!” which lighted Kate’s face with amusement. The next moment he had creaked away, over polished floors, after the others, and Milly was feeling as if she had been rude. But Lord Aldershaw was in every way a detail, and Kate was saying to her that she hoped she wasn’t ill.
Thus it was that, aloft there in the great gilded historic chamber and the presence of the pale personage on the wall, whose eyes all the while seemed engaged with her own, she found herself suddenly sunk in something quite intimate and humble and to which these grandeurs were strange enough witnesses. It had come up, in the form in which she had had to accept it, all suddenly, and nothing about it, at the same time, was more marked than that she had in a manner plunged into it to escape from something else. Something else, from her first vision of her friend’s appearance three minutes before, had been present to her even through the call made by the others on her attention; something that was perversely there, she was more and more uncomfortably finding, at least for the first moments and by some spring of its own, with every renewal of their meeting. “Is it the way she looks to him?“ she asked herself — the perversity being that she kept in remembrance that Kate was known to him. It wasn’t a fault in Kate — nor in him assuredly; and she had a horror, being generous and tender, of treating either of them as if it had been. To Densher himself she couldn’t make it up — he was too far away; but her secondary impulse was to make it up to Kate. She did so now with a strange soft energy — the impulse immediately acting. “Will you render me tomorrow a great service?”
“Any service, dear child, in the world.”
“But it’s a secret one — nobody must know. I must be wicked and false about it.”
“Then I’m your woman,” Kate smiled, “for that’s the kind of thing I love. Do let us do something bad. You’re impossibly without sin, you know.”
Milly’s eyes, on this, remained a little with their companion’s. “Ah, I shan’t perhaps come up to your idea. It’s only to deceive Susan Shepherd.”
“Oh!” said Kate as if this were indeed mild.
“But thoroughly — as thoroughly as I can.”
“And for cheating,” Kate asked, “my powers will contribute? Well, I’ll do my best for you.” In accordance with which it was presently settled between them that Milly should have the aid and comfort of her presence for a visit to Sir Luke Strett. Kate had needed a minute for enlightenment, and it was quite grand for her comrade that this name should have said nothing to her. To Milly herself it had for some days been secretly saying much. The personage in question was, as she explained, the greatest of medical
