d recognising not less promptly that they had ever new lights for
her--new lights on their own darkness. She gave herself up at last, and
it was a consummation like another: what she should have come to the
National Gallery for to-day would be to watch the copyists and reckon
the Baedekers. That perhaps was the moral of a menaced state of
health--that one would sit in public places and count the Americans. It
passed the time in a manner; but it seemed already the second line of
defence, and this notwithstanding the pattern, so unmistakable, of her
country-folk. They were cut out as by scissors, coloured, labelled,
mounted; but their relation to her failed to act--they somehow did
nothing for her. Partly, no doubt, they didn't so much as notice or
know her, didn't even recognise their community of collapse with her,
the sign on her, as she sat there, that for her too Europe was "tough."
It came to her idly thus--for her humour could still play--that she
didn't seem then the same success with them as with the inhabitants of
London, who had taken her up on scarce more of an acquaintance. She
could wonder if they would be different should she go back with that
glamour attached; and she could also wonder, if it came to that,
whether she should ever go back. Her friends straggled past, at any
rate, in all the vividness of their absent criticism, and she had even
at last the sense of taking a mean advantage. There was a finer
instant, however, at which three ladies, clearly a mother and
daughters, had paused before her under compulsion of a comment
apparently just uttered by one of them and referring to some object on
the other side of the room. Milly had her back to the object, but her
face very much to her young compatriot, the one who had spoken and in
whose look she perceived a certain gloom of recognition. Recognition,
for that matter, sat confessedly in her own eyes: she _knew_ the three,
generically, as easily as a schoolboy with a crib in his lap would know
the answer in class; she felt, like the schoolboy, guilty
enough--questioned, as honour went, as to her right so to possess, to
dispossess, people who hadn't consciously provoked her. She would have
been able to say where they lived, and how, had the place and the way
been but amenable to the positive; she bent tenderly, in imagination,
over marital, paternal Mr. Whatever-he-was, at home, eternally named,
with all the honours and placidities, but eternally unseen and