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By Root 16509 0

—the way he crumbed up his bread was a proof—why did he hover before her as a potentially insolent noble? She couldn’t have answered the question, and it was precisely one of those that swarmed. They were complicated, she might fairly have said, by his visibly knowing, having known from afar off, that she was a stranger and an American, and by his none the less making no more of it than if she and her like were the chief of his diet. He took her, kindly enough, but imperturbably, irreclaimably, for granted, and it wouldn’t in the least help that she herself knew him, as quickly, for having been in her country and threshed it out. There would be nothing for her to explain or attenuate or brag about; she could neither escape nor prevail by her strangeness; he would have, for that matter, on such a subject, more to tell her than to learn from her. She might learn from him why she was so different from the handsome girl—which she didn’t know, being merely able to feel it; or at any rate might learn from him why the handsome girl was so different from her.

On these lines, however, they would move later; the lines immediately laid down were, in spite of his vagueness for his own convenience, definite enough. She was already, he observed to her, thinking what she should say on her other side—which was what Americans were always doing. She needn’t in conscience say anything at all; but Americans never knew that, nor ever, poor creatures, yes (she had interposed the “poor creatures!”) what not to do. The burdens they took on—the things, positively, they made an affair of! This easy and after all friendly jibe at her race was really for her, on her new friend’s part, the note of personal recognition so far as she required it; and she gave him a prompt and conscious example of morbid anxiety by insisting that her desire to be, herself, “lovely” all round was justly founded on the lovely way Mrs. Lowder had met her. He was directly interested in that, and it was not till afterwards she fully knew how much more information about their friend he had taken than given. Here again for instance was a characteristic note: she had, on the spot, with her first plunge into the obscure depths of a society constituted from far back, encountered the interesting phenomenon of complicated, of possibly sinister motive. However, Maud Manningham (her name, even in her presence, somehow still fed the fancy) had, all the same, been lovely, and one was going to meet her now quite as far on as one had one’s self been met. She had been with them at their hotel—they were a pair—before even they had supposed she could have got their letter. Of course indeed they had written in advance, but they had followed that up very fast. She had thus engaged them to dine but two days later, and on the morrow again, without waiting for a return visit, without waiting for anything, she had called with her niece. It was as if she really cared for them, and it was magnificent fidelity—fidelity to Mrs. Stringham, her own companion and Mrs. Lowder’s former school-mate, the lady with the charming face and the rather high dress down there at the end.

Lord Mark took in through his nippers these balanced attributes of Susie. “But isn’t Mrs. Stringham’s fidelity then equally magnificent?”

“Well, it’s a beautiful sentiment; but it isn’t as if she had anything to give.”

“Hasn’t she got you?” Lord Mark asked without excessive delay.

“Me—to give Mrs. Lowder?” Milly had clearly not yet seen herself in the light of such an offering. “Oh I’m rather a poor present; and I don’t feel as if, even at that, I had as yet quite been given.”

“You’ve been shown, and if our friend has jumped at you it comes to the same thing.” He made his jokes, Lord Mark, without amusement for himself; yet it wasn’t that he was grim. “To be seen, you must recognise, is, for you, to be jumped at; and, if it’s a question of being shown, here you are again. Only it has now been taken out of your friend’s hands; it’s Mrs. Lowder already who’s getting the benefit. Look round the table, and you’ll make out, I think, that you