Mrs. Lowder herself found it enough simply to reply, in respect to Kate, that she was indeed a luxury to take about the world: she expressed no more surprise than that at her “rightness” today. Wasn’t it by this time sufficiently manifest that it was precisely as the very luxury she was proving that she had, from far back, been appraised and waited for? Crude elation, however, might be kept at bay, and the circumstance none the less demonstrated that they were all swimming together in the blue. It came back to Lord Mark again, as he seemed slowly to pass and repass and conveniently to linger before them; he was personally the note of the blue — like a suspended skein of silk within reach of the broiderer’s hand. Aunt Maud’s free-moving shuttle took a length of him at rhythmic intervals; and one of the intermixed truths that flickered across to Milly was that he ever so consentingly knew he was being worked in. This was almost like an understanding with her at Mrs. Lowder’s expense, which she would have none of; she wouldn’t for the world have had him make any such point as that he wouldn’t have launched them at Matcham — or whatever it was he had done — only for Aunt Maud’s beaux yeux. What he had done, it would have been guessable, was something he had for some time been desired in vain to do; and what they were all now profiting by was a change comparatively sudden, the cessation of hope delayed. What had caused the cessation easily showed itself as none of Milly’s business; and she was luckily, for that matter, in no real danger of hearing from him directly that her individual weight had been felt in the scale. Why then indeed was it an effect of his diffused but subdued participation that he might absolutely have been saying to her “Yes, let the dear woman take her own tone? Since she’s here she may stay,” he might have been adding —“for whatever she can make of it. But you and I are different.” Milly knew she was different in truth — his own difference was his own affair; but also she knew that, after all, even at their distinctest, Lord Mark’s “tips” in this line would be tacit. He practically placed her — it came round again to that — under no obligation whatever. It was a matter of equal ease, moreover, her letting Mrs. Lowder take a tone. She might have taken twenty — they would have spoiled nothing.
“You must stay on with us; you can, you know, in any position you like; any, any, any, my dear child”— and her emphasis went deep. “You must make your home with us; and it’s really open to you to make the most beautiful one in the world. You mustn’t be under a mistake — under any of any sort; and you must let us all think for you a little, take care of you and watch over you. Above all you must help me with Kate, and you must stay a little for her; nothing for a long time has happened to me so good as that you and she should have become friends. It’s beautiful; it’s great; it’s everything. What makes it perfect is that it should have come about through our dear delightful Susie, restored to me, after so many years, by such a miracle. No — that’s more charming to me than even your hitting it off with Kate. God has been good to one — positively; for I couldn’t, at my age, have made a new friend — undertaken, I mean, out of whole cloth, the real thing. It’s like changing one’s bankers — after fifty: one doesn’t do that. That’s why Susie has been kept for me, as you seem to keep people in your wonderful country, in lavender and pink paper — coming back at last as straight as out of a fairy-tale and with you as an attendant fairy.” Milly hereupon replied appreciatively that such a description of herself made her feel as if pink paper were her dress and lavender its trimming; but Aunt Maud was not to be deterred by a weak joke from keeping it up. Her interlocutress could feel besides that she kept it up in perfect sincerity. She was somehow at this hour a very happy woman, and a part of her happiness might precisely have been that her affections and her views were moving as never before in concert. Unquestionably she loved Susie; but she also loved Kate and loved Lord Mark, loved their funny old host and hostess, loved every one within range, down to the very servant who came to receive Milly’s empty iceplate — down, for that matter, to Milly herself, who was, while she talked, really conscious of the enveloping flap of a protective mantle, a shelter with the weight of an eastern carpet. An eastern carpet, for wishing-purposes of one’s own, was a thing to be on rather than under; still, however, if the girl should fail of breath it wouldn’t be, she could feel, by Mrs. Lowder’s fault. One of the last things she was afterwards to recall of this was Aunt Maud’s going on to say that she and Kate must stand together because together they could do anything. It was for Kate of course she was essentially planning; but the plan, enlarged and uplifted now, somehow required Milly’s prosperity too for its full operation, just as Milly’s prosperity at the same time involved Kate’s. It was nebulous yet, it was slightly confused, but it was unmistakably free and genial, and it made our young woman understand things Kate had said of her aunt’s possibilities as well as characterisations that had fallen from Susan Shepherd. One of the most frequent on the lips of the latter had been that dear Maud was a natural force.
XI
A prime reason, we must add, why sundry impressions were not to be fully present to the girl till later on was that they yielded at this stage, with an effect of sharp supersession, to a detached quarter of an hour — her only one — with Lord Mark. “Have you seen the picture in the house, the beautiful one that’s so like you?”— he was asking that as he stood before her; having come up at last with his smooth intimation that any wire he had pulled and yet wanted not to remind her of wasn’t quite a reason for his having no joy at all.
“I’ve been through rooms and I’ve seen pictures. But if I’m ‘like’ anything so beautiful as most of them seemed to me ——!” It needed in short for Milly some evidence, which he only wanted to supply. She was the image of the wonderful Bronzino, which she must have a look at on every ground. He had thus called her off and led her away; the more easily that the house within was above all what had already drawn round her its mystic circle. Their progress, meanwhile, was not of the straightest; it was an advance, without haste, through innumerable natural pauses and soft concussions, determined for the most part by the appearance before them of ladies and gentlemen, singly, in couples, in groups, who brought them to a stand with an inveterate “I say, Mark.” What they said she never quite made out; it was their all so domestically knowing him, and his knowing them, that mainly struck her, while her impression, for the rest, was but of fellow-strollers more vaguely afloat than themselves, supernumeraries mostly a little battered, whether as jaunty males or as ostensibly elegant women. They might have been moving a good deal by a momentum that had begun far back, but they were still brave and personable, still warranted for continuance as long again, and they gave her, in especial collectively, a sense of pleasant voices, pleasanter than those of actors, of friendly, empty words and kind, lingering eyes. The lingering eyes looked her over, the lingering eyes were what went, in almost confessed simplicity, with the pointless “I say, Mark “; and what was really most sensible of all was that, as a pleasant matter of course, if she didn’t mind, he seemed to suggest their letting people, poor dear things, have the benefit of her.
The odd part was that he made her herself believe, for amusement, in the benefit, measured by him in mere manner — for wonderful, of a truth, was, as a means of expression, his slightness of emphasis — that her present good-nature conferred. It was, as she could easily see, a mild common carnival of good-nature — a mass of