of ingredients oddly mixed. She caught Susie fairly
looking at her as if to know whether she had brought in guests to hear
Sir Luke Strett's report. Well, it was better her companion should have
too much than too little to wonder about; she had come out "anyway," as
they said at home, for the interest of the thing; and interest truly
sat in her eyes. Milly was none the less, at the sharpest crisis, a
little sorry for her; she could of necessity extract from the odd scene
so comparatively little of a soothing secret. She saw Mr. Densher
suddenly popping up, but she saw nothing else that had happened. She
saw in the same way her young friend indifferent to her young friend's
doom, and she lacked what would explain it. The only thing to keep her
in patience was the way, after luncheon, Kate almost, as might be said,
made up to her. This was actually perhaps as well what most kept Milly
herself in patience. It had in fact for our young woman a positive
beauty--was so marked as a deviation from the handsome girl's previous
courses. Susie had been a bore to the handsome girl, and the change was
now suggestive. The two sat together, after they had risen from table,
in the apartment in which they had lunched, making it thus easy for the
other guest and his entertainer to sit in the room adjacent. This, for
the latter personage, was the beauty; it was almost, on Kate's part,
like a prayer to be relieved. If she honestly liked better to be
"thrown with" Susan Shepherd than with their other friend, why that
said practically everything. It didn't perhaps altogether say why she
had gone out with him for the morning, but it said, as one thought,
about as much as she could say to his face.

Little by little indeed, under the vividness of Kate's behaviour, the
probabilities fell back into their order. Merton Densher was in love,
and Kate couldn't help it--could only be sorry and kind: wouldn't that,
without wild flurries, cover everything? Milly at all events tried it
as a cover, tried it hard, for the time; pulled it over her, in the
front, the larger room, drew it up to her chin with energy. If it
didn't, so treated, do everything for her, it did so much that she
could herself supply the rest. She made that up by the interest of her
great question, the question of whether, seeing him once more, with all
that, as she called it to herself, had come and gone, her impression of
him would be different from the impression received in New Yo