y or with hypocrisy,
professed in the matter an equal expertness; and Densher at last seemed
to know himself in presence of a social "case." It was Mrs. Stringham,
obviously, whose testimony would have been most invoked hadn't she
been, as her friend's representative, rather confined to the function
of inhaling the incense; so that Kate, who treated her beautifully,
smiling at her, cheering and consoling her across the table, appeared
benevolently both to speak and to interpret for her. Kate spoke as if
she wouldn't perhaps understand _their_ way of appreciating Milly, but
would let them none the less, in justice to their good will, express it
in their coarser fashion. Densher himself wasn't unconscious in respect
to this of a certain broad brotherhood with Mrs. Stringham; wondering
indeed, while he followed the talk, how it might move American nerves.
He had only heard of them before, but in his recent tour he had caught
them in the remarkable fact, and there was now a moment or two when it
came to him that he had perhaps--and not in the way of an escape--taken
a lesson from them. They quivered, clearly, they hummed and drummed,
they leaped and bounded in Mrs. Stringham's typical organism--this lady
striking him as before all things excited, as, in the native phrase,
keyed-up, to a perception of more elements in the occasion than he was
himself able to count. She was accessible to sides of it, he imagined,
that were as yet obscure to him; for, though she unmistakeably rejoiced
and soared, he none the less saw her at moments as even more agitated
than pleasure required. It was a state of emotion in her that could
scarce represent simply an impatience to report at home. Her little dry
New England brightness--he had "sampled" all the shades of the American
complexity, if complexity it were--had its actual reasons for finding
relief most in silence; so that before the subject was changed he
perceived (with surprise at the others) that they had given her enough
of it. He had quite had enough of it himself by the time he was asked
if it were true that their friend had really not made in her own
country the mark she had chalked so large in London. It was Mrs. Lowder
herself who addressed him that enquiry; while he scarce knew if he were
the more impressed with her launching it under Mrs. Stringham's nose or
with her hope that he would allow to London the honour of discovery.
The less expansive of the white waistcoats propounded