d
you all, here, know each other--I see that--so far as you know
anything. You know what you're used to, and it's your being used to
it--that, and that only--that makes you. But there are things you don't
know."

He took it in as if it might fairly, to do him justice, be a point.
"Things that _I_ don't--with all the pains I take and the way I've run
about the world to leave nothing unlearned?"

Milly thought, and it was perhaps the very truth of his claim--its not
being negligible--that sharpened her impatience and thereby her wit.
"You're _blase,_ but you're not enlightened. You're familiar with
everything, but conscious, really of nothing. What I mean is that
you've no imagination."

Lord Mark, at this, threw back his head, ranging with his eyes the
opposite side of the room and showing himself at last so much more
completely as diverted that it fairly attracted their hostess's notice.
Mrs. Lowder, however, only smiled on Milly for a sign that something
racy was what she had expected, and resumed, with a splash of her
screw, her cruise among the islands. "Oh, I've heard that," the young
man replied, "before!"

"There it is then. You've heard everything before. You've heard _me_ of
course before, in my country, often enough."

"Oh, never too often," he protested; "I'm sure I hope I shall still
hear you again and again."

"But what good then has it done you?" the girl went on as if now
frankly to amuse him.

"Oh, you'll see when you know me."

"But, most assuredly, I shall never know you."

"Then that will be exactly," he laughed, "the good!"

If it established thus that they couldn't, or Wouldn't, mix, why, none
the less, did Milly feel, through it, a perverse quickening of the
relation to which she had been, in spite of herself, appointed?

What queerer consequence of their not mixing than their talking--for it
was what they had arrived at--almost intimately? She wished to get away
from him, or indeed, much rather, away from herself so far as she was
present to him. She saw already--wonderful creature, after all, herself
too--that there would be a good deal more of him to come for her, and
that the special sign of their intercourse would be to keep herself out
of the question. Everything else might come in--only never that; and
with such an arrangement they might even go far. This in fact might
quite have begun, on the spot, with her returning again to the topic of
the handsome girl. If she was to keep