t was at that comparatively gross
circumstance, now so fully placed before them, that Milly's anxious
companion sat and looked--looked very much as some spectator in an
old-time circus might have watched the oddity of a Christian maiden, in
the arena, mildly, caressingly, martyred. It was the nosing and
fumbling not of lions and tigers but of domestic animals let loose as
for the joke. Even the joke made Mrs. Stringham uneasy, and her mute
communion with Densher, to which we have alluded, was more and more
determined by it. He wondered afterwards if Kate had made this out;
though it was not indeed till much later on that he found himself, in
thought, dividing the things she might have been conscious of from the
things she must have missed. If she actually missed, at any rate, Mrs.
Stringham's discomfort, that but showed how her own idea held her. Her
own idea was, by insisting on the fact of the girl's prominence as a
feature of the season's end, to keep Densher in relation, for the rest
of them, both to present and to past. "It's everything that has
happened _since_ that makes you naturally a little shy about her. You
don't know what has happened since, but we do; we've seen it and
followed it; we've a little been _of_ it." The great thing for him, at
this, as Kate gave it, _was_ in fact quite irresistibly that the case
was a real one--the kind of thing that, when one's patience was shorter
than one's curiosity, one had vaguely taken for possible in London, but
in which one had never been even to this small extent concerned. The
little American's sudden social adventure, her happy and, no doubt,
harmless flourish, had probably been favoured by several accidents, but
it had been favoured above all by the simple spring-board of the scene,
by one of those common caprices of the numberless foolish flock,
gregarious movements as inscrutable as ocean-currents. The huddled herd
had drifted to her blindly--it might as blindly have drifted away.
There had been of course a signal, but the great reason was probably
the absence at the moment of a larger lion. The bigger beast would come
and the smaller would then incontinently vanish. It was at all events
characteristic, and what was of the essence of it was grist to his
scribbling mill, matter for his journalising hand. That hand already,
in intention, played over it, the "motive," as a sign of the season, a
feature of the time, of the purely expeditious and rough-and-tumble
natur