o befriended--an intuitive cunning within
her managing this last--for a thorough bad one. The compatriots, in
short, by what she made out, approved her friends for their expert
wisdom with her; in spite of which judicial sagacity it was the
compatriots who recorded themselves as the innocent parties. She saw
things in these days that she had never seen before, and she couldn't
have said why save on a principle too terrible to name; whereby she saw
that neither Lancaster Gate was what New York took it for, nor New York
what Lancaster Gate fondly fancied it in coquetting with the plan of a
series of American visits. The plan might have been, humorously, on
Mrs. Lowder's part, for the improvement of her social position--and it
had verily in that direction lights that were perhaps but half a
century too prompt; at all of which Kate Croy assisted with the cool
controlled facility that went so well, as the others said, with her
particular kind of good looks, the kind that led you to expect the
person enjoying them _would_ dispose of disputations, speculations,
aspirations, in a few very neatly and brightly uttered words, so
simplified in sense, however, that they sounded, even when guiltless,
like rather aggravated slang. It wasn't that Kate hadn't pretended too
that _she_ should like to go to America; it was only that with this
young woman Milly had constantly proceeded, and more than ever of late,
on the theory of intimate confessions, private frank ironies that made
up for their public grimaces and amid which, face to face, they wearily
put off the mask.

These puttings-off of the mask had finally quite become the form taken
by their moments together, moments indeed not increasingly frequent and
not prolonged, thanks to the consciousness of fatigue on Milly's side
whenever, as she herself expressed it, she got out of harness. They
flourished their masks, the independent pair, as they might have
flourished Spanish fans; they smiled and sighed on removing them; but
the gesture, the smiles, the sighs, strangely enough, might have been
suspected the greatest reality in the business. Strangely enough, we
say, for the volume of effusion in general would have been found by
either on measurement to be scarce proportional to the paraphernalia of
relief. It was when they called each other's attention to their ceasing
to pretend, it was then that what they were keeping back was most in
the air. There was a difference, no doubt, and m