amusement of the meeting for the
princess too; princesses living for the most part, in such an appeased
way, on the plane of mere elegant representation. That was why they
pounced, at city gates, on deputed flower-strewing damsels; that was
why, after effigies, processions, and other stately games, frank human
company was pleasant to them. Kate Croy really presented herself to
Milly--the latter abounded for Mrs. Stringham in accounts of it--as the
wondrous London girl in person, by what she had conceived, from far
back, of the London girl; conceived from the tales of travellers and
the anecdotes of New York, from old porings over _Punch_ and a liberal
acquaintance with the fiction of the day. The only thing was that she
was nicer, for the creature in question had rather been, to our young
woman, an image of dread. She had thought of her, at her best, as
handsome just as Kate was, with turns of head and tones of voice,
felicities of stature and attitude, things "put on" and, for that
matter, put off, all the marks of the product of a packed society who
should be at the same time the heroine of a strong story. She placed
this striking young person from the first in a story, saw her, by a
necessity of the imagination, for a heroine, felt it the only character
in which she wouldn't be wasted; and this in spite of the heroine's
pleasant abruptness, her forbearance from gush, her umbrellas and
jackets and shoes--as these things sketched themselves to Milly--and
something rather of a breezy boy in the carriage of her arms and the
occasional freedom of her slang.

When Milly had settled that the extent of her goodwill itself made her
shy, she had found for the moment quite a sufficient key, and they were
by that time thoroughly afloat together. This might well have been the
happiest hour they were to know, attacking in friendly independence
their great London--the London of shops and streets and suburbs oddly
interesting to Milly, as well as of museums, monuments, "sights" oddly
unfamiliar to Kate, while their elders pursued a separate course, both
rejoicing in their intimacy and each thinking the other's young woman a
great acquisition for her own. Milly expressed to Susan Shepherd more
than once that Kate had some secret, some smothered trouble, besides
all the rest of her history; and that if she had so good-naturedly
helped Mrs. Lowder to meet them this was exactly to create a diversion,
to give herself something else to th