other, and if the handsome girl's place among
them was something even their initiation couldn't deal with--why, then,
she would indeed be a quantity.

VIII

That sense of quantities, separate or mixed, was indeed doubtless what
most prevailed at first for our slightly gasping American pair; it
found utterance for them in their frequent remark to each other that
they had no one but themselves to thank. It dropped from Milly more
than once that if she had ever known it was so easy--! though her
exclamation mostly ended without completing her idea. This, however,
was a trifle to Mrs. Stringham, who cared little whether she meant that
in this case she would have come sooner. She couldn't have come sooner,
and she perhaps, on the contrary, meant--for it would have been like
her--that she wouldn't have come at all; why it was so easy being at
any rate a matter as to which her companion had begun quickly to pick
up views. Susie kept some of these lights for the present to herself,
since, freely communicated, they might have been a little disturbing;
with which, moreover, the quantities that we speak of as surrounding
the two ladies were, in many cases, quantities of things--and of other
things--to talk about. Their immediate lesson, accordingly, was that
they just had been caught up by the incalculable strength of a wave
that was actually holding them aloft and that would naturally dash them
wherever it liked. They meanwhile, we hasten to add, make the best of
their precarious position, and if Milly had had no other help for it
she would have found not a little in the sight of Susan Shepherd's
state. The girl had had nothing to say to her, for three days, about
the "success" announced by Lord Mark--which they saw, besides,
otherwise established; she was too taken up, too touched, by Susie's
own exaltation. Susie glowed in the light of her justified faith;
everything had happened that she had been acute enough to think least
probable; she had appealed to a possible delicacy in Maud Manningham--a
delicacy, mind you, but _barely_ possible--and her appeal had been met
in a way that was an honour to human nature. This proved sensibility of
the lady of Lancaster Gate performed verily, for both our friends,
during these first days, the office of a fine floating gold-dust,
something that threw over the prospect a harmonising blur. The forms,
the colours behind it were strong and deep--we have seen how they
already stood out for Mi