It was as if Kate had but too conveniently put the words into her
mouth. "Learning, I mean, so easily, that I _am_ well."

"Only, no one's of course well enough to stay in London now. He can't,"
Kate went on, "want this of you."

"Mercy, no--I'm to knock about. I'm to go to places."

"But not beastly 'climates'--Engadines, Rivieras, boredoms?"

"No; just, as I say, where I prefer. I'm to go in for pleasure."

"Oh, the duck!"--Kate, with her own shades of familiarity, abounded.
"But what kind of pleasure?"

"The highest," Milly smiled.

Her friend met it as nobly. "Which is the highest?"

"Well, it's just our chance to find out. You must help me."

"What have I wanted to do but help you," Kate asked, "from the moment I
first laid eyes on you?" Yet with this too Kate had her wonder. "I like
your talking, though, about that. What help, with your luck all round,
do you want?"

XIV

Milly indeed at last couldn't say; so that she had really for the time
brought it along to the point so oddly marked for her by her visitor's
arrival, the truth that she was enviably strong. She carried this out,
from that evening, for each hour still left her, and the more easily
perhaps that the hours were now narrowly numbered. All she actually
waited for was Sir Luke Strett's promised visit; as to her proceeding
on which, however, her mind was quite made up. Since he wanted to get
at Susie he should have the freest access, and then perhaps he would
see how he liked it. What was between _them_ they might settle as
between them, and any pressure it should lift from her own spirit they
were at liberty to convert to their use. If the dear man wished to fire
Susan Shepherd with a still higher ideal, he would only after all, at
the worst, have Susan on his hands. If devotion, in a word, was what it
would come up for the interested pair to organise, she was herself
ready to consume it as the dressed and served dish. He had talked to
her of her "appetite" her account of which, she felt, must have been
vague. But for devotion, she could now see, this appetite would be of
the best. Gross, greedy, ravenous--these were doubtless the proper
names for her: she was at all events resigned in advance to the
machinations of sympathy. The day that followed her lonely excursion
was to be the last but two or three of their stay in London; and the
evening of that day practically ranked for them as, in the matter of
outside relations, the last of