nts had been offered her, but her eagerness was
shamelessly human, and she seemed really to count more on the
revelation of the anxious lady of Chelsea than on the best nights of
the opera. Kate admired, and showed it, such an absence of fear: to the
fear of being bored, in such a connection, she would have been so
obviously entitled. Milly's answer to this was the plea of her
curiosities--which left her friend wondering as to their odd direction.
Some among them, no doubt, were rather more intelligible, and Kate had
heard without wonder that she was blank about Lord Mark. This young
lady's account of him, at the same time, professed itself as frankly
imperfect; for what they best knew him by at Lancaster Gate was a thing
difficult to explain. One knew people in general by something they had
to show, something that, either for them or against, could be touched
or named or proved; and she could think of no other case of a value
taken as so great and yet flourishing untested. His value was his
future, which had somehow got itself as accepted by Aunt Maud as if it
had been his good cook or his steam-launch. She, Kate, didn't mean she
thought him a humbug; he might do great things--but they were all, as
yet, so to speak, he had done. On the other hand it was of course
something of an achievement, and not open to every one, to have got
one's self taken so seriously by Aunt Maud. The best thing about him,
doubtless, on the whole, was that Aunt Maud believed in him. She was
often fantastic, but she knew a humbug, and--no, Lord Mark wasn't that.
He had been a short time in the House, on the Tory side, but had lost
his seat on the first opportunity, and this was all he had to point to.
However, he pointed to nothing; which was very possibly just a sign of
his real cleverness, one of those that the really clever had in common
with the really void. Even Aunt Maud frequently admitted that there was
a good deal, for her view of him, to come up in the rear. And he wasn't
meanwhile himself indifferent--indifferent to himself--for he was
working Lancaster Gate for all it was worth: just as it was, no doubt,
working _him,_ and just as the working and the worked were in London,
as one might explain, the parties to every relation.

Kate did explain, for her listening friend: every one who had anything
to give--it was true they were the fewest--made the sharpest possible
bargain for it, got at least its value in return. The strangest thing,