hostess's brilliant niece.

They had plenty, on these lines, the two elder women, to give and to
take, and it was even not quite clear to the pilgrim from Boston that
what she should mainly have arranged for in London was not a series of
thrills for herself. She had a bad conscience, indeed almost a sense of
immorality, in having to recognise that she was, as she said, carried
away. She laughed to Milly when she also said that she didn't know
where it would end; and the principal of her uneasiness was that Mrs.
Lowder's life bristled for her with elements that she was really having
to look at for the first time. They represented, she believed, the
world, the world that, as a consequence of the cold shoulder turned to
it by the Pilgrim Fathers, had never yet boldly crossed to Boston--it
would surely have sunk the stoutest Cunarder--and she couldn't pretend
that she faced the prospect simply because Milly had had a caprice. She
was in the act herself of having one, directed precisely to their
present spectacle. She could but seek strength in the thought that she
had never had one--or had never yielded to one, which came to the same
thing--before. The sustaining sense of it all, moreover, as literary
material--that quite dropped from her. She must wait, at any rate, she
should see: it struck her, so far as she had got, as vast, obscure,
lurid. She reflected in the watches of the night that she was probably
just going to love it for itself--that is for itself and Milly. The odd
thing was that she could think of Milly's loving it without dread--or
with dread, at least not on the score of conscience, only on the score
of peace. It was a mercy, at all events, for the hour, that their
fancies jumped together.

While, for this first week that followed their dinner, she drank deep
at Lancaster Gate, her companion was no less happily, appeared to be
indeed on the whole quite as romantically, provided for. The handsome
English girl from the heavy English house had been as a figure in a
picture stepping by magic out of its frame: it was a case, in truth,
for which Mrs. Stringham presently found the perfect image. She had
lost none of her grasp, but quite the contrary, of that other conceit
in virtue of which Milly was the wandering princess: so what could be
more in harmony now than to see the princess waited upon at the city
gate by the worthiest maiden, the chosen daughter of the burgesses? It
was the real again, evidently, the