e're not ignorant of
that, are we?--to marry Lord Mark. Hasn't she told you so?"

"Hasn't Mrs. Lowder told me?"

"No; hasn't Kate? It isn't, you know, that she doesn't know it."

Milly had, under her comrade's eyes, a minute of mute detachment. She
had lived with Kate Croy for several days in a state of intimacy as
deep as it had been sudden, and they had clearly, in talk, in many
directions, proceeded to various extremities. Yet it now came over her
as in a clear cold way that there was a possible account of their
relations in which the quantity her new friend had told her might have
figured as small, as smallest, beside the quantity she hadn't. She
couldn't say, at any rate, whether or no she had made the point that
her aunt designed her for Lord Mark: it had only sufficiently come
out--which had been, moreover, eminently guessable--that she was
involved in her aunt's designs. Somehow, for Milly, brush it over
nervously as she might and with whatever simplifying hand, this abrupt
extrusion of Mr. Densher altered all proportions, had an effect on all
values. It was fantastic of her to let it make a difference that she
couldn't in the least have defined--and she was at least, even during
these instants, rather proud of being able to hide, on the spot, the
difference it did make. Yet, all the same, the effect for her was,
almost violently, of Mr. Densher's having been there--having been where
she had stood till now in her simplicity--before her. It would have
taken but another free moment to make her see abysses--since abysses
were what she wanted--in the mere circumstance of his own silence, in
New York, about his English friends. There had really been in New York
little time for anything; but, had she liked, Milly could have made it
out for herself that he had avoided the subject of Miss Croy, and that
Miss Croy was yet a subject it could never be natural to avoid. It was
to be added at the same time that even if his silence had been
labyrinthe--which was absurd in view of all the other things too he
couldn't possibly have spoken of--this was exactly what must suit her,
since it fell under the head of the plea she had just uttered to Susie.
These things, however, came and went, and it set itself up between the
companions, for the occasion, in the oddest way, both that their
happening all to know Mr. Densher--except indeed that Susie didn't, but
probably would,--was a fact belonging, in a world of rushing about, to
o