n particular knew of it was that he
seemed to stand in it up to his neck. He moved about in it and it made
no plash; he floated, he noiselessly swam in it, and they were all
together, for that matter, like fishes in a crystal pool. The effect of
the place, the beauty of the scene, had probably much to do with it;
the golden grace of the high rooms, chambers of art in themselves, took
care, as an influence, of the general manner, and made people bland
without making them solemn. They were only people, as Mrs. Stringham
had said, staying for the week or two at the inns, people who during
the day had fingered their Baedekers, gaped at their frescoes and
differed, over fractions of francs, with their gondoliers. But Milly,
let loose among them in a wonderful white dress, brought them somehow
into relation with something that made them more finely genial; so that
if the Veronese picture of which he had talked with Mrs. Stringham was
not quite constituted, the comparative prose of the previous hours, the
traces of insensibility qualified by "beating down," were at last
almost nobly disowned. There was perhaps something for him in the
accident of his seeing her for the first time in white, but she hadn't
yet had occasion--circulating with a clearness intensified--to strike
him as so happily pervasive. She was different, younger, fairer, with
the colour of her braided hair more than ever a not altogether lucky
challenge to attention; yet he was loth wholly to explain it by her
having quitted this once, for some obscure yet doubtless charming
reason, her almost monastic, her hitherto inveterate black. Much as the
change did for the value of her presence, she had never yet, when all
was said, made it for _him_; and he was not to fail of the further
amusement of judging her determined in the matter by Sir Luke Strett's
visit. If he could in this connexion have felt jealous of Sir Luke
Strett, whose strong face and type, less assimilated by the scene
perhaps than any others, he was anon to study from the other side of
the saloon, that would doubtless have been most amusing of all. But he
couldn't be invidious, even to profit by so high a tide; he felt
himself too much "in" it, as he might have said: a moment's reflexion
put him more in than any one. The way Milly neglected him for other
cares while Kate and Mrs. Lowder, without so much as the attenuation of
a joke, introduced him to English ladies--that was itself a proof; for
nothi