ise word, Milly showed
perhaps, musingly, charmingly, that, though her attention had been
mainly soundless, her friend's story--produced as a resource
unsuspected, a card from up the sleeve--half surprised, half beguiled
her. Since the matter, such as it was, depended on that, she brought
out, before she went to bed, an easy, a light "Risk everything!"

This quality in it seemed possibly a little to deny weight to Maud
Lowder's evoked presence--as Susan Stringham, still sitting up, became,
in excited reflection, a trifle more conscious. Something determinant,
when the girl had left her, took place in her--nameless but, as soon as
she had given way, coercive. It was as if she knew again, in this
fulness of time, that she had been, after Maud's marriage, just
sensibly outlived or, as people nowadays said, shunted. Mrs. Lowder had
left her behind, and on the occasion, subsequently, of the
corresponding date in her own life--not the second, the sad one, with
its dignity of sadness, but the first, with the meagreness of its
supposed felicity--she had been, in the same spirit, almost
patronisingly pitied. If that suspicion, even when it had ceased to
matter, had never quite died out for her, there was doubtless some
oddity in its now offering itself as a link, rather than as another
break, in the chain; and indeed there might well have been for her a
mood in which the notion of the development of patronage in her quondam
schoolmate would have settled her question in another sense. It was
actually settled--if the case be worth our analysis--by the happy
consummation, the poetic justice, the generous revenge, of her having
at last something to show. Maud, on their parting company, had appeared
to have so much, and would now--for wasn't it also, in general, quite
the rich law of English life?--have, with accretions, promotions,
expansions, ever so much more. Very good; such things might be; she
rose to the sense of being ready for them. Whatever Mrs. Lowder might
have to show--and one hoped one did the presumptions all justice--she
would have nothing like Milly Theale, who constituted the trophy
producible by poor Susan. Poor Susan lingered late--till the candles
were low, and as soon as the table was cleared she opened her neat
portfolio. She had not lost the old clue; there were connections she
remembered, addresses she could try; so the thing was to begin. She
wrote on the spot.

BOOK FOURTH

VII

It had all gone