n an
occasion chanced to present itself, she made a point of not omitting to
remark that it might be a comfort to know in advance even an
individual. This still, however, failed in vulgar parlance, to "fetch"
Milly, so that she had presently to go all the way. "Haven't I
understood from you, for that matter, that you gave Mr. Densher
something of a promise?"

There was a moment, on this, when Milly's look had to be taken as
representing one of two things--either that she was completely vague
about the promise or that Mr. Densher's name itself started no train.
But she really couldn't be so vague about the promise, her
interlocutress quickly saw, without attaching it to something; it had
to be a promise to somebody in particular to be so repudiated. In the
event, accordingly, she acknowledged Mr. Merton Densher, the so
unusually clever young Englishman who had made his appearance in New
York on some special literary business--wasn't it?--shortly before
their departure, and who had been three or four times in her house
during the brief period between her visit to Boston and her companion's
subsequent stay with her; but she required much reminding before it
came back to her that she had mentioned to this companion just
afterwards the confidence expressed by the personage in question in her
never doing so dire a thing as to come to London without, as the phrase
was, looking a fellow up. She had left him the enjoyment of his
confidence, the form of which might have appeared a trifle free--that
she now reasserted; she had done nothing either to impair or to enhance
it; but she had also left Mrs. Stringham, in the connection and at the
time, rather sorry to have missed Mr. Densher. She had thought of him
again after that, the elder woman; she had likewise gone so far as to
notice that Milly appeared not to have done so--which the girl might
easily have betrayed; and, interested as she was in everything that
concerned her, she had made out for herself, for herself only and
rather idly, that, but for interruptions, the young Englishman might
have become a better acquaintance. His being an acquaintance at all was
one of the signs that in the first days had helped to place Milly, as a
young person with the world before her, for sympathy and wonder.
Isolated, unmothered, unguarded, but with her other strong marks, her
big house, her big fortune, her big freedom, she had lately begun to
"receive," for all her few years, as an older