h it wouldn't be, she
could feel, by Mrs. Lowder's fault. One of the last things she was
afterwards to recall of this was Aunt Maud's going on to say that she
and Kate must stand together because together they could do anything.
It was for Kate of course she was essentially planning; but the plan,
enlarged and uplifted now, somehow required Milly's prosperity too for
its full operation, just as Milly's prosperity at the same time
involved Kate's. It was nebulous yet, it was slightly confused, but it
was unmistakably free and genial, and it made our young woman
understand things Kate had said of her aunt's possibilities as well as
characterisations that had fallen from Susan Shepherd. One of the most
frequent on the lips of the latter had been that dear Maud was a
natural force.

XI

A prime reason, we must add, why sundry impressions were not to be
fully present to the girl till later on was that they yielded at this
stage, with an effect of sharp supersession, to a detached quarter of
an hour--her only one--with Lord Mark. "Have you seen the picture in
the house, the beautiful one that's so like you?"--he was asking that
as he stood before her; having come up at last with his smooth
intimation that any wire he had pulled and yet wanted not to remind her
of wasn't quite a reason for his having no joy at all.

"I've been through rooms and I've seen pictures. But if I'm 'like'
anything so beautiful as most of them seemed to me----!" It needed in
short for Milly some evidence, which he only wanted to supply. She was
the image of the wonderful Bronzino, which she must have a look at on
every ground. He had thus called her off and led her away; the more
easily that the house within was above all what had already drawn round
her its mystic circle. Their progress, meanwhile, was not of the
straightest; it was an advance, without haste, through innumerable
natural pauses and soft concussions, determined for the most part by
the appearance before them of ladies and gentlemen, singly, in couples,
in groups, who brought them to a stand with an inveterate "I say,
Mark." What they said she never quite made out; it was their all so
domestically knowing him, and his knowing them, that mainly struck her,
while her impression, for the rest, was but of fellow-strollers more
vaguely afloat than themselves, supernumeraries mostly a little
battered, whether as jaunty males or as ostensibly elegant women. They
might have been moving a