general connection, it were of bridges or of
intervals that the spirit not locally disciplined would find itself
most conscious. It was as if at home, by contrast, there were
neither--neither the difference itself, from position to position, nor,
on either side, and particularly on one, the awfully good manner, the
conscious sinking of a consciousness, that made up for it. The
conscious sinking, at all events, and the awfully good manner, the
difference, the bridge, the interval, the skipped leaves of the social
atlas--these, it was to be confessed, had a little, for our young lady,
in default of stouter stuff, to work themselves into the light literary
legend--a mixed, wandering echo of Trollope, of Thackeray, perhaps
mostly of Dickens--under favour of which her pilgrimage had so much
appealed. She could relate to Susie later on, late the same evening,
that the legend, before she had done with it, had run clear, that the
adored author of _The Newcomes_, in fine, had been on the whole the
note: the picture lacking thus more than she had hoped, or rather
perhaps showing less than she had feared, a certain possibility of
Pickwickian outline. She explained how she meant by this that Mrs.
Condrip had not altogether proved another Mrs. Nickleby, nor even--for
she might have proved almost anything, from the way poor worried Kate
had spoken--a widowed and aggravated Mrs. Micawber.

Mrs. Stringham, in the midnight conference, intimated rather yearningly
that, however the event might have turned, the side of English life
such experiences opened to Milly were just those she herself seemed
"booked"--as they were all, roundabout her now, always saying--to miss:
she had begun to have a little, for her fellow-observer, these moments
of fanciful reaction--reaction in which she was once more all Susan
Shepherd--against the high sphere of colder conventions into which her
overwhelming connection with Maud Manningham had rapt her. Milly never
lost sight, for long, of the Susan Shepherd side of her, and was always
there to meet it when it came up and vaguely, tenderly, impatiently to
pat it, abounding in the assurance that they would still provide for
it. They had, however, to-night, another matter in hand; which proved
to be presently, on the girl's part, in respect to her hour of Chelsea,
the revelation that Mrs. Condrip, taking a few minutes when Kate was
away with one of the children, in bed upstairs for some small
complaint, had sud