good deal by a momentum that had begun far
back, but they were still brave and personable, still warranted for
continuance as long again, and they gave her, in especial collectively,
a sense of pleasant voices, pleasanter than those of actors, of
friendly, empty words and kind, lingering eyes. The lingering eyes
looked her over, the lingering eyes were what went, in almost confessed
simplicity, with the pointless "I say, Mark "; and what was really most
sensible of all was that, as a pleasant matter of course, if she didn't
mind, he seemed to suggest their letting people, poor dear things, have
the benefit of her.

The odd part was that he made her herself believe, for amusement, in
the benefit, measured by him in mere manner--for wonderful, of a truth,
was, as a means of expression, his slightness of emphasis--that her
present good-nature conferred. It was, as she could easily see, a mild
common carnival of good-nature--a mass of London people together, of
sorts and sorts, but who mainly knew each other and who, in their way,
did, no doubt, confess to curiosity. It had gone round that she was
there; questions about her would be passing; the easiest thing was to
run the gauntlet with _him_--just as the easiest thing was in fact to
trust him generally. Couldn't she know for herself, passively, how
little harm they meant her?--to that extent that it made no difference
whether or not he introduced them. The strangest thing of all for Milly
was perhaps the uplifted assurance and indifference with which she
could simply give back the particular bland stare that appeared in such
cases to mark civilisation at its highest. It was so little her fault,
this oddity of what had "gone round" about her, that to accept it
without question might be as good a way as another of feeling life. It
was inevitable to supply the probable description--that of the awfully
rich young American who was so queer to behold, but nice, by all
accounts, to know; and she had really but one instant of speculation as
to fables or fantasies perchance originally launched. She asked herself
once only if Susie could, inconceivably, have been blatant about her;
for the question, on the spot, was really blown away for ever. She knew
in fact on the spot and with sharpness just why she had "elected" Susan
Shepherd: she had had from the first hour the conviction of her being
precisely the person in the world least possibly a trumpeter. So it
wasn't their fault, it