even more candles than their friend's large common allowance--she grew
daily more splendid; they were all struck with it and chaffed her about
it--lighted up the pervasive mystery of Style. He had thus five minutes
with the good lady before Mrs. Lowder and Kate appeared--minutes
illumined indeed to a longer reach than by the number of Milly's
candles.

"_May_ she come down--ought she if she isn't really up to it?"

He had asked that in the wonderment always stirred in him by
glimpses--rare as were these--of the inner truth about the girl. There
was of course a question of health--it was in the air, it was in the
ground he trod, in the food he tasted, in the sounds he heard, it was
everywhere. But it was everywhere with the effect of a request to
him--to his very delicacy, to the common discretion of others as well
as his own--that no allusion to it should be made. There had
practically been none, that morning, on her explained
non-appearance--the absence of it, as we know, quite monstrous and
awkward; and this passage with Mrs. Stringham offered him his first
licence to open his eyes. He had gladly enough held them closed; all
the more that his doing so performed for his own spirit a useful
function. If he positively wanted not to be brought up with his nose
against Milly's facts, what better proof could he have that his conduct
was marked by straightness? It was perhaps pathetic for her, and for
himself was perhaps even ridiculous; but he hadn't even the amount of
curiosity that he would have had about an ordinary friend. He might
have shaken himself at moments to try, for a sort of dry decency, to
have it; but that too, it appeared, wouldn't come. In what therefore
was the duplicity? He was at least sure about his feelings--it being so
established that he had none at all. They were all for Kate, without a
feather's weight to spare. He was acting for Kate--not, by the
deviation of an inch, for her friend. He was accordingly not
interested, for had he been interested he would have cared, and had he
cared he would have wanted to know. Had he wanted to know he wouldn't
have been purely passive, and it was his pure passivity that had to
represent his dignity and his honour. His dignity and his honour, at
the same time, let us add, fortunately fell short to-night of spoiling
his little talk with Susan Shepherd. One glimpse--it was as if she had
wished to give him that; and it was as if, for himself, on current
terms, he