however, Kate stared. “But could he, in so few minutes, ask you enough ——?”
“He asked me scarcely anything — he doesn’t need to do anything so stupid,” Milly said. “He can tell. He knows,” she repeated; “and when I go back — for he’ll have thought me over a little — it will be all right.”
Kate, after a moment, made the best of this. “Then when are we to come?”
It just pulled her friend up, for even while they talked — at least it was one of the reasons — she stood there suddenly, irrelevantly, in the light of her other identity, the identity she would have for Mr. Densher. This was always, from one instant to another, an incalculable light, which, though it might go off faster than it came on, necessarily disturbed. It sprang, with a perversity all its own, from the fact that, with the lapse of hours and days, the chances themselves that made for his being named continued so oddly to fail. There were twenty, there were fifty, but none of them turned up. This, in particular, was of course not a juncture at which the least of them would naturally be present; but it would make, none the less, Milly saw, another day practically all stamped with avoidance. She saw in a quick glimmer, and with it all Kate’s unconsciousness; and then she shook off the obsession. But it had lasted long enough to qualify her response. No, she had shown Kate how she trusted her; and that, for loyalty, would somehow do. “Oh, dear thing, now that the ice is broken I shan’t trouble you again.”
“You’ll come alone?”
“Without a scruple. Only I shall ask you, please, for your absolute discretion still.”
Outside, before the door, on the wide pavement of the great square, they had to wait again while their carriage, which Milly had kept, completed a further turn of exercise, engaged in by the coachman for reasons of his own. The footman was there, and had indicated that he was making the circuit; so Kate went on while they stood. “But don’t you ask a good deal, darling, in proportion to what you give?”
This pulled Milly up still shorter — so short in fact that she yielded as soon as she had taken it in. But she continued to smile. “I see. Then you can tell.”
“I don’t want to ‘tell,’” said Kate. “I’ll be as silent as the tomb if I can only have the truth from you. All I want is that you shouldn’t keep from me how you find out that you really are.”
“Well then, I won’t, ever. But you see for yourself,” Milly went on, “how I really am. I’m satisfied. I’m happy.”
Kate looked at her long. “I believe you like it. The way things turn out for you ——!”
Milly met her look now without a thought of anything but the spoken. She had ceased to be Mr. Densher’s image; she was all her own memento and she was none the less fine. Still, still, what had passed was a fair bargain, and it would do. “Of course I like it. I feel — I can’t otherwise describe it — as if I had been, on my knees, to the priest. I’ve confessed and I’ve been absolved. It has been lifted off.”
Kate’s eyes never quitted her. “He must have liked you.“
“Oh — doctors!” Milly said. “But I hope,” she added, “he didn’t like me too much.” Then as if to escape a little from her friend’s deeper sounding, or as impatient for the carriage, not yet in sight, her eyes, turning away, took in the great stale square. As its staleness, however, was but that of London fairly fatigued, the late hot London with its dance all danced and its story all told, the air seemed a thing of blurred pictures and mixed echoes, and an impression met the sense — an impression that broke, the next moment, through the girl’s tightened lips. “Oh, it’s a beautiful big world, and everyone, yes, everyone ——!” It presently brought her back to Kate, and she hoped she didn’t actually look as much as if she were crying as she must have looked to Lord Mark among the portraits at Matcham.
Kate at all events understood. “Everyone wants to be so nice?”
“So nice,” said the grateful Milly.
“Oh,” Kate laughed, “we’ll pull you through! And won’t you now bring Mrs. Stringham?”
But Milly after an instant was again clear about that. “Not till I’ve seen him once more.”
She was to have found this preference, two days later, abundantly justified; and yet when, in prompt accordance with what had passed between them, she reappeared before her distinguished friend — that character having, for him, in the interval, built itself up still higher — the first thing he asked her was whether she had been accompanied. She told him, on this, straightway, everything; completely free at present from her first embarrassment, disposed even — as she felt she might become — to undue volubility, and conscious moreover of no alarm from his thus perhaps wishing that she had not come alone. It was exactly as if, in the forty-eight hours that had passed, her acquaintance with him had somehow increased, and his own knowledge in particular received mysterious additions. They had been together, before, scarce ten minutes; but the relation, the one the ten minutes had so beautifully created, was there to take straight up: and this not, on his own part, from mere professional heartiness, mere bedside manner, which she would have disliked — much rather from a quiet, pleasant air in him of having positively asked about her, asked here and there and found out. Of course he couldn’t in the least have asked, or have wanted to; there was no source of information to his hand, and he had really needed none: he had found out simply by his genius — and found out, she meant, literally everything. Now she knew not only that she didn’t dislike this — the state of being found out about; but that, on the contrary, it was truly what she had come for, and that, for the time at least, it would give her something firm to stand on. She struck herself as aware, aware as she had never been, of really not having had from the beginning anything firm. It would be strange for the firmness to come, after all, from her learning in these agreeable conditions that she was in some way doomed; but above all it would prove how little she had hitherto had to hold her up. If she was now to be held up by the mere process — since that was perhaps on the cards — of being let down, this would only testify in turn to her queer little history. That sense of loosely rattling had been no process at all; and it was ridiculously true that her thus sitting there to see her life put into the scales represented her first approach to the taste of orderly living. Such was Milly’s romantic version — that her life, especially by the fact of this second interview, was put into the scales; and just the best part of the relation established might have been, for that matter, that the great grave charming man knew, had known at once, that it was romantic, and in that measure allowed for it. Her only doubt, her only fear, was whether he perhaps wouldn’t even take advantage of her being a little romantic to treat her as romantic altogether. This doubtless was her danger with him; but she should see, and dangers in general meanwhile dropped and dropped.
The very place, at the end of a few minutes, the commodious, “handsome” room, far back in the fine old house, soundless from position, somewhat sallow with years of celebrity, somewhat sombre even at midsummer — the very place put on for her a look of custom and use, squared itself solidly round her as with promises and certainties. She had come forth to see the world, and this then was to be the world’s light, the rich dusk of a London “back,” these the world’s walls, those the world’s curtains and carpet. She should be intimate with the great bronze clock and mantel-ornaments, conspicuously presented in gratitude and long ago; she should be as one of the circle of eminent contemporaries, photographed, engraved, signatured, and in particular framed and glazed, who made up the rest of the decoration, and made up as well so much of the human comfort; and while she thought of all the clean truths, unfringed, unfingered, that the listening stillness, strained into pauses
