to her companions.

Social paragraphs about royalties, dukes and duchesses, lords and
ladies, court balls and glittering functions, she devoured and learned
by heart. An abominably vulgar little person, she was an interestingly
pertinacious creature, and wrought night and day at acquiring an air of
fashionable elegance, at first naturally laying it on in such manner
as suggested that it should be scraped off with a knife, but with
experience gaining a certain specious knowledge of forms. How
the over-mature child at school had assimilated her uncanny young
worldliness, it would have been less difficult to decide, if possible
sources had been less numerous. The air was full of it, the literature
of the day, the chatter of afternoon teas, the gossip of the hour.
Before she was fifteen she saw the indiscretion of her childish
frankness, and realised that it might easily be detrimental to her
ambitions. She said no more of her plans for her future, and even took
the astute tone of carelessly treating as a joke her vulgar little past.
But no titled foreigner appeared upon the horizon without setting her
small, but business-like, brain at work. Her lack of wealth and assured
position made her situation rather hopeless. She was not of the class
of lucky young women whose parents' gorgeous establishments offered
attractions to wandering persons of rank. She and her mother lived in
a flat, and gave rather pathetic afternoon teas in return for such
more brilliant hospitalities as careful and pertinacious calling and
recalling obliged their acquaintances to feel they could not decently be
left wholly out of. Milly and her anxious mother had worked hard. They
lost no opportunity of writing a note, or sending a Christmas card, or
an economical funeral wreath. By daily toil and the amicable ignoring
of casualness of manner or slights, they managed to cling to the edge of
the precipice of social oblivion, into whose depths a lesser degree
of assiduity, or a greater sensitiveness, would have plunged them.
Once--early in Milly's career, when her ever-ready chatter and her
superficial brightness were a novelty, it had seemed for a short time
that luck might be glancing towards her. A young man of foreign title
and of Bohemian tastes met her at a studio dance, and, misled by the
smartness of her dress and her always carefully carried air of careless
prosperity, began to pay a delusive court to her. For a few weeks all
her freshest frocks