of the French windows standing open,
passed out to the balcony that overhung, with pretensions, the general
entrance, and so was in time for the look that Kate, alighting, paying
her cabman, happened to send up to the front. The visitor moreover had
a shilling back to wait for, during which Milly, from the balcony,
looked down at her, and a mute exchange, but with smiles and nods, took
place between them on what had occurred in the morning. It was what
Kate had called for, and the tone was thus, almost by accident,
determined for Milly before her friend came up. What was also, however,
determined for her was, again, yet irrepressibly again, that the image
presented to her, the splendid young woman who looked so particularly
handsome in impatience, with the fine freedom of her signal, was the
peculiar property of somebody else's vision, that this fine freedom in
short was the fine freedom she showed Mr. Densher. Just so was how she
looked to him, and just so was how Milly was held by her--held as by
the strange sense of seeing through that distant person's eyes. It
lasted, as usual, the strange sense, but fifty seconds; yet in so
lasting it produced an effect. It produced in fact more than one, and
we take them in their order. The first was that it struck our young
woman as absurd to say that a girl's looking so to a man could possibly
be without connections; and the second was that by the time Kate had
got into the room Milly was in mental possession of the main connection
it must have for herself.

She produced this commodity on the spot--produced it, that is, in
straight response to Kate's frank "Well, what?" The inquiry bore of
course, with Kate's eagerness, on the issue of the morning's scene, the
great man's latest wisdom, and it doubtless affected Milly a little as
the cheerful demand for news is apt to affect troubled spirits when
news is not, in one of the neater forms, prepared for delivery. She
couldn't have said what it was exactly that, on the instant, determined
her; the nearest description of it would perhaps have been as the more
vivid impression of all her friend took for granted. The contrast
between this free quantity and the maze of possibilities through which,
for hours, she had herself been picking her way, put on, in short, for
the moment, a grossness that even friendly forms scarce lightened: it
helped forward in fact the revelation to herself that she absolutely
had nothing to tell. Besides whic