ess, a straight skylark-flight
of charity, to Aunt Maud.

Kate had, for her new friend's eyes, the extraordinary and attaching
property of appearing at a given moment to show as a beautiful
stranger, to cut her connections and lose her identity, letting the
imagination for the time make what it would of them--make her merely a
person striking from afar, more and more pleasing as one watched, but
who was above all a subject for curiosity. Nothing could have given
her, as a party to a relation, a greater freshness than this
sense--which sprang up at its own hours--of being as curious about her
as if one hadn't known her. It had sprung up, we have gathered, as soon
as Milly had seen her after hearing from Mrs. Stringham of her
knowledge of Merton Densher; she had _looked_ then other and, as Milly
knew the real critical mind would call it, more objective; and our
young woman had foreseen it of her, on the spot, that she would often
look so again. It was exactly what she was doing this afternoon; and
Milly, who had amusements of thought that were like the secrecies of a
little girl playing with dolls when conventionally "too big," could
almost settle to the game of what one would suppose her, how one would
place her, if one didn't know her. She became thus, intermittently, a
figure conditioned only by the great facts of aspect, a figure to be
waited for, named and fitted. This was doubtless but a way of feeling
that it was of her essence to be peculiarly what the occasion, whatever
it might be, demanded when its demand was highest. There were probably
ways enough, on these lines, for such a consciousness; another of them
would be, for instance, to say that she was made for great social uses.
Milly was not wholly sure that she herself knew what great social uses
might be--unless, as a good example, exerting just that sort of glamour
in just that sort of frame were one of them: she would have fallen back
on knowing sufficiently that they existed at all events for her friend.
It imputed a primness, all round, to be reduced but to saying, by way
of a translation of one's amusement, that she was always so
_right_--since that, too often, was what the _insupportables_
themselves were; yet it was, in overflow to Aunt Maud, what she had to
content herself withal--save for the lame enhancement of saying she was
lovely. It served, all the same, the purpose, strengthened the bond
that for the time held the two ladies together, distilled