nd she
had tried to listen, had cultivated them and had answered back; these
had been weeks in which there were other things they might well prevent
her from hearing. More than the prospect had at first promised or
threatened she had felt herself going on in a crowd and with a
multiplied escort; the four ladies pictured by her to Sir Luke Strett
as a phalanx comparatively closed and detached had in fact proved a
rolling snowball, condemned from day to day to cover more ground. Susan
Shepherd had compared this portion of the girl's excursion to the
Empress Catherine's famous progress across the steppes of Russia;
improvised settlements appeared at each turn of the road, villagers
waiting with addresses drawn up in the language of London. Old friends
in fine were in ambush, Mrs. Lowder's, Kate Croy's, her own; when the
addresses weren't in the language of London they were in the more
insistent idioms of American centres. The current was swollen even by
Susie's social connexions; so that there were days, at hotels, at
Dolomite picnics, on lake steamers, when she could almost repay to Aunt
Maud and Kate with interest the debt contracted by the London "success"
to which they had opened the door.

Mrs. Lowder's success and Kate's, amid the shock of Milly's and Mrs.
Stringham's compatriots, failed but little, really, of the
concert-pitch; it had gone almost as fast as the boom, over the sea, of
the last great native novel. Those ladies were "so
different"--different, observably enough, from the ladies so appraising
them; it being throughout a case mainly of ladies, of a dozen at once
sometimes, in Milly's apartment, pointing, also at once, that moral and
many others. Milly's companions were acclaimed not only as perfectly
fascinating in themselves, the nicest people yet known to the
acclaimers, but as obvious helping hands, socially speaking, for the
eccentric young woman, evident initiators and smoothers of her path,
possible subduers of her eccentricity. Short intervals, to her own
sense, stood now for great differences, and this renewed inhalation of
her native air had somehow left her to feel that she already, that she
mainly, struck the compatriot as queer and dissociated. She moved such
a critic, it would appear, as to rather an odd suspicion, a benevolence
induced by a want of complete trust: all of which showed her in the
light of a person too plain and too ill-clothed for a thorough good
time, and yet too rich and to