could have done the very
question she had suddenly put to Mrs. Stringham on the Bruenig. Should
she have it, whatever she did have, that question had been, for long?
"Ah, so possibly not," her neighbour appeared to reply; "therefore,
don't you see? _I'm_ the way." It was vivid that he might be, in spite
of his absence of flourish; the way being doubtless just _in_ that
absence. The handsome girl, whom she didn't lose sight of and who, she
felt, kept her also in view--Mrs. Lowder's striking niece would,
perhaps, be the way as well, for in her too was the absence of
flourish, though she had little else, so far as one could tell, in
common with Lord Mark. Yet how indeed _could_ one tell, what did one
understand, and of what was one, for that matter, provisionally
conscious but of their being somehow together in what they represented?
Kate Croy, fine but friendly, looked over at her as really with a guess
at Lord Mark's effect on her. If she could guess this effect what then
did she know about it and in what degree had she felt it herself? Did
that represent, as between them, anything particular, and should she
have to count with them as duplicating, as intensifying by a mutual
intelligence, the relation into which she was sinking? Nothing was so
odd as that she should have to recognise so quickly in each of these
glimpses of an instant the various signs of a relation; and this
anomaly itself, had she had more time to give to it, might well, might
almost terribly have suggested to her that her doom was to live fast.
It was queerly a question of the short run and the consciousness
proportionately crowded.

These were immense excursions for the spirit of a young person at Mrs.
Lowder's mere dinner-party; but what was so significant and so
admonitory as the fact of their being possible? What could they have
been but just a part, already, of the crowded consciousness? And it was
just a part, likewise, that while plates were changed and dishes
presented and periods in the banquet marked; while appearances insisted
and phenomena multiplied and words reached her from here and there like
plashes of a slow, thick tide; while Mrs. Lowder grew somehow more
stout and more instituted and Susie, at her distance and in comparison,
more thinly improvised and more different--different, that is, from
every one and everything: it was just a part that while this process
went forward our young lady alighted, came back, taking up her destiny
a