n sufficiently revealed for us, no doubt--and
with other things to our purpose--in two or three of those confidential
passages with Mrs. Lowder that she now permitted herself. She hadn't
yet been so glad that she believed in her old friend; for if she hadn't
had, at such a pass, somebody or other to believe in she should
certainly have stumbled by the way. Discretion had ceased to consist of
silence; silence was gross and thick, whereas wisdom should taper,
however tremulously, to a point. She betook herself to Lancaster Gate
the morning after the colloquy just noted; and there, in Maud
Manningham's own sanctum, she gradually found relief in giving an
account of herself. An account of herself was one of the things that
she had long been in the habit of expecting herself regularly to
give--the regularity depending of course much on such tests of merit as
might, by laws beyond her control, rise in her path. She never spared
herself in short a proper sharpness of conception of how she had
behaved, and it was a statement that she for the most part found
herself able to make. What had happened at present was that nothing, as
she felt, was left of her to report to; she was all too sunk in the
inevitable and the abysmal. To give an account of herself she must give
it to somebody else, and her first instalment of it to her hostess was
that she must please let her cry. She couldn't cry, with Milly in
observation, at the hotel, which she had accordingly left for that
purpose; and the power happily came to her with the good opportunity.
She cried and cried at first--she confined herself to that; it was for
the time the best statement of her business. Mrs. Lowder moreover
intelligently took it as such, though knocking off a note or two more,
as she said, while Susie sat near her table. She could resist the
contagion of tears, but her patience did justice to her visitor's most
vivid plea for it. "I shall never be able, you know, to cry again--at
least not ever with _her;_ so I must take it out when I can. Even if
she does herself it won't be for me to give away; for what would that
be but a confession of despair? I'm not with her for that--I'm with her
to be regularly sublime. Besides, Milly won't cry herself."

"I'm sure I hope," said Mrs. Lowder, "that she won't have occasion to."

"She won't even if she does have occasion. She won't shed a tear.
There's something that will prevent her."

"Oh!" said Mrs. Lowder.

"Yes, her pri