her to Lancaster Gate, and then she had walked with him
away from it--for all the world, she said to herself, like the
housemaid giggling to the baker.

This appearance, she was afterwards to feel, had been all in order for
a relation that might precisely best be described in the terms of the
baker and the housemaid. She could say to herself that from that hour
they had kept company; that had come to represent, technically
speaking, alike the range and the limit of their tie. He had on the
spot, naturally, asked leave to call upon her--which, as a young person
who wasn't really young, who didn't pretend to be a sheltered flower,
she as rationally gave. That--she was promptly clear about it--was now
her only possible basis; she was just the contemporary London female,
highly modern, inevitably battered, honourably free. She had of course
taken her aunt straight into her confidence--had gone through the form
of asking her leave; and she subsequently remembered that though, on
this occasion, she had left the history of her new alliance as scant as
the facts themselves, Mrs. Lowder had struck her at the time
surprisingly mild. It had been, in every way, the occasion, full of the
reminder that her hostess was deep: it was definitely then that she had
begun to ask herself what Aunt Maud was, in vulgar parlance, "up to."
"You may receive, my dear, whom you like"--that was what Aunt Maud, who
in general objected to people's doing as they liked, had replied; and
it bore, this unexpectedness, a good deal of looking into. There were
many explanations, and they were all amusing--amusing, that is, in the
line of the sombre and brooding amusement, cultivated by Kate in her
actual high retreat. Merton Densher came the very next Sunday; but Mrs.
Lowder was so consistently magnanimous as to make it possible to her
niece to see him alone. She saw him, however, on the Sunday following,
in order to invite him to dinner; and when, after dining, he came
again--which he did three times, she found means to treat his visit as
preponderantly to herself. Kate's conviction that she didn't like him
made that remarkable; it added to the evidence, by this time
voluminous, that she was remarkable all round. If she had been, in the
way of energy, merely usual, she would have kept her dislike direct;
whereas it was now as if she were seeking to know him in order to see
best where to "have" him. That was one of the reflections made in our
young woman's