er hand, were not that, and who didn't know
_she_ was (which she liked--it relegated them still further) and didn't
know, either, how it enabled her to judge them. She had never seen
herself so much in this light as during the actual phase of her
associated, if slightly undirected, pilgrimage; and the consciousness
gave perhaps to her plea for a pause more intensity than she knew. The
irrecoverable days had come back to her from far off; they were part of
the sense of the cool upper air and of everything else that hung like
an indestructible scent to the torn garment of youth--the taste of
honey and the luxury of milk, the sound of cattle-bells and the rush of
streams, the fragrance of trodden balms and the dizziness of deep
gorges.

Milly clearly felt these things too, but they affected her companion at
moments--that was quite the way Mrs. Stringham would have expressed
it--as the princess in a conventional tragedy might have affected the
confidant if a personal emotion had ever been permitted to the latter.
That a princess could only be a princess was a truth with which,
essentially, a confidant, however responsive, had to live. Mrs.
Stringham was a woman of the world, but Milly Theale was a princess,
the only one she had yet had to deal with, and this in its way, too,
made all the difference. It was a perfectly definite doom for the
wearer--it was for every one else a perfectly palpable quality. It
might have been, possibly, with its involved loneliness and other
mysteries, the weight under which she fancied her companion's admirable
head occasionally, and ever so submissively, bowed. Milly had quite
assented at luncheon to their staying over, and had left her to look at
rooms, settle questions, arrange about their keeping on their carriage
and horses; cares that had now moreover fallen to Mrs. Stringham as a
matter of course and that yet for some reason, on this occasion
particularly, brought home to her--all agreeably, richly, almost
grandly--what it was to live with the great. Her young friend had, in a
sublime degree, a sense closed to the general question of difficulty,
which she got rid of, furthermore, not in the least as one had seen
many charming persons do, by merely passing it on to others. She kept
it completely at a distance: it never entered the circle; the most
plaintive confidant couldn't have dragged it in; and to tread the path
of a confidant was accordingly to live exempt. Service was in other
wor