ht. "If you've got
an ailment?"

"If I've got everything," Milly laughed.

"Ah, _that_--like almost nobody else."

"Then for how long?"

Mrs. Stringham's eyes entreated her; she had gone close to her, half
enclosed her with urgent arms. "Do you want to see some one?" And then
as the girl only met it with a slow headshake, though looking perhaps a
shade more conscious: "We'll go straight to the best near doctor." This
too, however, produced but a gaze of qualified assent and a silence,
sweet and vague, that left everything open. Our friend decidedly lost
herself. "Tell me, for God's sake, if you're in distress."

"I don't think I've really _everything,"_ Milly said as if to
explain--and as if also to put it pleasantly.

"But what on earth can I do for you?" The girl hesitated, then seemed
on the point of being able to say; but suddenly changed and expressed
herself otherwise. "Dear, dear thing--I'm only too happy!"

It brought them closer, but it rather confirmed Mrs. Stringham's doubt.
"Then what's the matter?"

"That's the matter--that I can scarcely bear it."

"But what is it you think you haven't got?"

Milly waited another moment; then she found it, and found for it a dim
show of joy. "The power to resist the bliss of what I _have!"_

Mrs. Stringham took it in--her sense of being "put off" with it, the
possible, probable irony of it--and her tenderness renewed itself in
the positive grimness of a long murmur. "Whom will you see?"--for it
was as if they looked down from their height at a continent of doctors.
"Where will you first go?"

Milly had for the third time her air of consideration; but she came
back with it to her plea of some minutes before. "I'll tell you at
supper--good-bye till then." And she left the room with a lightness
that testified for her companion to something that again particularly
pleased her in the renewed promise of motion. The odd passage just
concluded, Mrs. Stringham mused as she once more sat alone with a
hooked needle and a ball of silk, the "fine" work with which she was
always provided--this mystifying mood had simply been precipitated, no
doubt, by their prolonged halt, with which the girl hadn't really been
in sympathy. One had only to admit that her complaint was in fact but
the excess of the joy of life, and everything _did_ then fit. She
couldn't stop for the joy, but she could go on for it, and with the
sense of going on she floated again, was restored to her grea