ch. Never mind; it was
with this other side now fully presented that Kate came and went,
kissed her for greeting and for parting, talked, as usual, of
everything but--as it had so abruptly become for Milly--_the_ thing.
Our young woman, it is true, would doubtless not have tasted so sharply
a difference in this pair of occasions had she not been tasting so
peculiarly her own possible betrayals. What happened was that
afterwards, on separation, she wondered if the matter had not mainly
been that she herself was so "other," so taken up with the unspoken;
the strangest thing of all being, still subsequently, that when she
asked herself how Kate could have failed to feel it she became
conscious of being here on the edge of a great darkness. She should
never know how Kate truly felt about anything such a one as Milly
Theale should give her to feel. Kate would never--and not from
ill-will, nor from duplicity, but from a sort of failure of common
terms--reduce it to such a one's comprehension or put it within her
convenience.

It was as such a one, therefore, that, for three or four days more,
Milly watched Kate as just such another; and it was presently as such a
one that she threw herself into their promised visit, at last achieved,
to Chelsea, the quarter of the famous Carlyle, the field of exercise of
his ghost, his votaries, and the residence of "poor Marian," so often
referred to and actually a somewhat incongruous spirit there. With our
young woman's first view of poor Marian everything gave way but the
sense of how, in England, apparently, the social situation of sisters
could be opposed, how common ground, for a place in the world, could
quite fail them: a state of things sagely perceived to be involved in
an hierarchical, an aristocratic order. Just whereabouts in the order
Mrs. Lowder had established her niece was a question not wholly void,
as yet, no doubt, of ambiguity--though Milly was withal sure Lord Mark
could exactly have fixed the point if he would, fixing it at the same
time for Aunt Maud herself; but it was clear that Mrs. Condrip was, as
might have been said, in quite another geography. She would not, in
short, have been to be found on the same social map, and it was as if
her visitors had turned over page after page together before the final
relief of their benevolent "Here!" The interval was bridged, of course,
but the bridge, verily, was needed, and the impression left Milly to
wonder whether, in the