cled, aproned, absorbed, engaged her
sympathy to an absurd extent, seemed to show her for the time the right
way to live. She should have been a lady copyist--it met so the case.
The case was the case of escape, of living under water, of being at
once impersonal and firm. There it was before one--one had only to
stick and stick.

Milly yielded to this charm till she was almost ashamed; she watched
the lady-copyists till she found herself wondering what would be
thought by others of a young woman, of adequate aspect, who should
appear to regard them as the pride of the place. She would have liked
to talk to them, to get, as it figured to her, into their lives, and
was deterred but by the fact that she didn't quite see herself as
purchasing imitations and yet feared she might excite the expectation
of purchase. She really knew before long that what held her was the
mere refuge, that something within her was after all too weak for the
Turners and Titians. They joined hands about her in a circle too vast,
though a circle that a year before she would only have desired to
trace. They were truly for the larger, not for the smaller life, the
life of which the actual pitch, for example, was an interest, the
interest of compassion, in misguided efforts. She marked absurdly her
little stations, blinking, in her shrinkage of curiosity, at the
glorious walls, yet keeping an eye on vistas and approaches, so that
she shouldn't be flagrantly caught. The vistas and approaches drew her
in this way from room to room, and she had been through many parts of
the show, as she supposed, when she sat down to rest. There were chairs
in scant clusters, places from which one could gaze. Milly indeed at
present fixed her eyes more than elsewhere on the appearance, first,
that she couldn't quite, after all, have accounted to an examiner for
the order of her "schools," and then on that of her being more tired
than she had meant, in spite of her having been so much less
intelligent. They found, her eyes, it should be added, other occupation
as well, which she let them freely follow: they rested largely, in her
vagueness, on the vagueness of other visitors; they attached themselves
in especial, with mixed results, to the surprising stream of her
compatriots. She was struck with the circumstance that the great
museum, early in August, was haunted with these pilgrims, as also with
that of her knowing them from afar, marking them easily, each and all,
an