The idea of his frivolity had, no doubt, to do with his personal designation, which represented — as yet, for our young woman, a little confusedly — a connection with an historic patriciate, a class that, in turn, also confusedly, represented an affinity with a social element that she had never heard otherwise described than as “fashion.” The supreme social element in New York had never known itself but as reduced to that category, and though Milly was aware that, as applied to a territorial and political aristocracy, the label was probably too simple, she had for the time none other at hand. She presently, it is true, enriched her idea with the perception that her interlocutor was indifferent; yet this, indifferent as aristocracies notoriously were, saw her but little further, inasmuch as she felt that, in the first place, he would much rather get on with her than not, and in the second was only thinking of too many matters of his own. If he kept her in view on the one hand and kept so much else on the other — 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 that she fully knew how much more information about their friend he had taken than given. Here again, for instance, was a pertinent note for her: 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, 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 schoolmate, 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 presently asked.
“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’ve 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’re being, from top to bottom, jumped at.”
“Well, then,” said Milly, “I seem also to feel that I like it better than being made fun of.”
It was one of the things she afterwards saw — Milly was for ever seeing things afterwards — that her companion had here had some way of his own, quite unlike any one’s else, of assuring her of his consideration. She wondered how he had done it, for he had neither apologised nor protested. She said to herself, at any rate, that he had led her on; and what was most odd was the question by which he had done so. “Does she know much about you?”
“No, she just likes us.”
Even for this his travelled lordship, seasoned and saturated, had no laugh. “I mean you particularly. Has that lady with the charming face, which is charming, told her?”
Milly hesitated. “Told her what?”
“Everything.”
This, with the way he dropped it, again considerably moved her — made her feel for a moment that, as a matter of course, she was a subject for disclosures. But she quickly found her answer. “Oh, as for that, you must ask her.“
“Your clever companion?”
“Mrs. Lowder.”
He replied to this that their hostess was a person with whom there were certain liberties one never took, but that he was none the less fairly upheld, inasmuch as she was for the most part kind to him and as, should he be very good for a while, she would probably herself tell him. “And I shall have, at any rate, in the meantime, the interest of seeing what she does with you. That will teach me more or less, you see, how much she knows.”
Milly followed this — it was lucid; but it suggested something apart. “How much does she know about you?“
“Nothing,” said Lord Mark serenely. “But that doesn’t matter — for what she does with me.” And then, as to anticipate Milly’s question about the nature of such doing: “This, for instance — turning me straight on for you.“
The girl thought. “And you mean she wouldn’t if she did know ——?”
He met it as if it were really a point. “No. I believe, to do her justice, she still would. So you can be easy.”
Milly had the next instant, then, acted on the permission. “Because you’re even at the worst the best thing she has?”
With this he was at last amused. “I was till you came. You’re the best now.”
It was strange his words should have given her the sense of his knowing, but it was positive that they did so, and to the extent of making her believe them, though still with wonder. That, really, from this first of their meetings, was what was most to abide with her: she accepted almost helplessly, she surrendered to the inevitability of being the sort of thing, as he might have said, that he at least thoroughly believed he had, in going about, seen here enough of for all practical purposes. Her submission was naturally, moreover, not to be impaired by her learning later