ng her black dress, her white face and her vivid hair as
the mere last broken link: such a picture quite threw into the shade
the brief biography, however sketchily amplified, of a mere
middle-class nobody in Bayswater. And though that indeed might be but a
Bayswater way of putting it, in addition to which Milly was in the
stage of interest in Bayswater ways, this critic so far prevailed that,
like Mrs. Stringham herself, she fairly got her companion to accept
from her that she was quite the nearest approach to a practical
princess Bayswater could hope ever to know. It was a fact--it became
one at the end of three days--that Milly actually began to borrow from
the handsome girl a sort of view of her state; the handsome girl's
impression of it was clearly so sincere. This impression was a tribute,
a tribute positively to power, power the source of which was the last
thing Kate treated as a mystery. There were passages, under all their
skylights, the succession of their shops being large, in which the
latter's easy, yet the least bit dry manner sufficiently gave out that
if she had had so deep a pocket----!

It was not moreover by any means with not having the imagination of
expenditure that she appeared to charge her friend, but with not having
the imagination of terror, of thrift, the imagination or in any degree
the habit of a conscious dependence on others. Such moments, when all
Wigmore Street, for instance, seemed to rustle about and the pale girl
herself to be facing the different rustlers, usually so
undiscriminated, as individual Britons too, Britons personal, parties
to a relation and perhaps even intrinsically remarkable--such moments
in especial determined in Kate a perception of the high happiness of
her companion's liberty. Milly's range was thus immense; she had to ask
nobody for anything, to refer nothing to any one; her freedom, her
fortune and her fancy were her law; an obsequious world surrounded her,
she could sniff up at every step its fumes. And Kate, in these days,
was altogether in the phase of forgiving her so much bliss; in the
phase moreover of believing that, should they continue to go on
together, she would abide in that generosity. She had, at such a point
as this, no suspicion of a rift within the lute--by which we mean not
only none of anything's coming between them, but none of any definite
flaw in so much clearness of quality. Yet, all the same, if Milly, at
Mrs. Lowder's banquet, had des