hand
together, why, what could be jollier for each? When she reflected
indeed a little on the oddity of her wanting two at once, Kate had the
natural reply that it was exactly what showed her sincerity. She
invariably gave way to feeling, and feeling had distinctly popped up in
her on the advent of her girlhood's friend. The way the cat would jump
was always, in presence of anything that moved her, interesting to see;
visibly enough, moreover, for a long time, it hadn't jumped anything
like so far. This, in fact, as we already know, remained the marvel for
Milly Theale, who, on sight of Mrs. Lowder, found fifty links in
respect to Susie absent from the chain of association. She knew so
herself what she thought of Susie that she would have expected the lady
of Lancaster Gate to think something quite different; the failure of
which endlessly mystified her. But her mystification was the cause for
her of another fine impression, inasmuch as when she went so far as to
observe to Kate that Susan Shepherd--and especially Susan Shepherd
emerging so uninvited from an irrelevant past--ought, by all the
proprieties, simply to have bored Aunt Maud, her confidant agreed with
her without a protest and abounded in the sense of her wonder. Susan
Shepherd at least bored the niece--that was plain; this young woman saw
nothing in her--nothing to account for anything, not even for Milly's
own indulgence: which little fact became in turn to the latter's mind a
fact of significance. It was a light on the handsome girl--representing
more than merely showed--that poor Susie was simply as nought to her.
This was, in a manner too, a general admonition to poor Susie's
companion, who seemed to see marked by it the direction in which she
had best most look out.

It just faintly rankled in her that a person who was good enough and to
spare for Milly Theale shouldn't be good enough for another girl;
though, oddly enough, she could easily have forgiven Mrs. Lowder
herself the impatience. Mrs. Lowder didn't feel it, and Kate Croy felt
it with ease; yet in the end, be it added, she grasped the reason, and
the reason enriched her mind. Wasn't it sufficiently the reason that
the handsome girl was, with twenty other splendid qualities, the least
bit brutal too, and didn't she suggest, as no one yet had ever done for
her new friend, that there might be a wild beauty in that, and even a
strange grace? Kate wasn't brutally brutal--which Milly had hitherto
b