d again, in reference to what her friend had
already told her of this, her little tone of a moment before. "But Mrs.
Condrip's own great point is that Aunt Maud herself won't hear of any
such person. Mr. Densher, she holds that's the way, at any rate, it was
explained to me--won't ever be either a public man or a rich man. If he
were public she'd be willing, as I understand, to help him; if he were
rich--without being anything else--she'd do her best to swallow him. As
it is, she taboos him."

"In short," said Mrs. Stringham as with a private purpose, "she told
you, the sister, all about it. But Mrs. Lowder likes him," she added.

"Mrs. Condrip didn't tell me that."

"Well, she does, all the same, my dear, extremely."

"Then there it is!" On which, with a drop and one of those sudden,
slightly sighing surrenders to a vague reflux and a general fatigue
that had recently more than once marked themselves for her companion,
Milly turned away. Yet the matter was not left so, that night, between
them, albeit neither perhaps could afterwards have said which had first
come back to it. Milly's own nearest approach, at least, for a little,
to doing so, was to remark that they appeared all--every one they
saw--to think tremendously of money. This prompted in Susie a laugh,
not untender, the innocent meaning of which was that it came, as a
subject for indifference, money did, easier to some people than to
others: she made the point in fairness, however, that you couldn't have
told, by any too crude transparency of air, what place it held for Maud
Manningham. She did her worldliness with grand proper silences--if it
mightn't better be put perhaps that she did her detachment with grand
occasional pushes. However Susie put it, in truth, she was really, in
justice to herself, thinking of the difference, as favourites of
fortune, between her old friend and her new. Aunt Maud sat somehow in
the midst of her money, founded on it and surrounded by it, even if
with a clever high manner about it, her manner of looking, hard and
bright, as if it weren't there. Milly, about hers, had no manner at
all--which was possibly, from a point of view, a fault: she was at any
rate far away on the edge of it, and you hadn't, as might be said, in
order to get at her nature, to traverse, by whatever avenue, any piece
of her property. It was clear, on the other hand, that Mrs. Lowder was
keeping her wealth as for purposes, imaginations, ambitions, that w