e of the social boom. The boom as in _itself_ required--that would
be the note; the subject of the process a comparatively minor question.
Anything was boomable enough when nothing else was more so: the author
of the "rotten" book, the beauty who was no beauty, the heiress who was
only that, the stranger who was for the most part saved from being
inconveniently strange but by being inconveniently familiar, the
American whose Americanism had been long desperately discounted, the
creature in fine as to whom spangles or spots of any sufficiently
marked and exhibited sort could be loudly enough predicated.

So he judged at least, within his limits, and the idea that what he had
thus caught in the fact was the trick of fashion and the tone of
society went so far as to make him take up again his sense of
independence. He had supposed himself civilised; but if this was
civilisation--! One could smoke one's pipe outside when twaddle was
within. He had rather avoided, as we have remarked, Kate's eyes, but
there came a moment when he would fairly have liked to put it, across
the table, to her: "I say, light of my life, is _this_ the great
world?" There came another, it must be added--and doubtless as a result
of something that, over the cloth, did hang between them--when she
struck him as having quite answered: "Dear no--for what do you take me?
Not the least little bit: only a poor silly, though quite harmless,
imitation." What she might have passed for saying, however, was
practically merged in what she did say, for she came overtly to his
aid, very much as if guessing some of his thoughts. She enunciated, to
relieve his bewilderment, the obvious truth that you couldn't leave
London for three months at that time of the year and come back to find
your friends just where they were. As they had _of course_ been jigging
away they might well be so red in the face that you wouldn't know them.
She reconciled in fine his disclaimer about Milly with that honour of
having discovered her which it was vain for him modestly to shirk. He
_had_ unearthed her, but it was they, all of them together, who had
developed her. She was always a charmer, one of the greatest ever seen,
but she wasn't the person he had "backed."

Densher was to feel sure afterwards that Kate had had in these
pleasantries no conscious, above all no insolent purpose of making
light of poor Susan Shepherd's property in their young friend--which
property, by such remarks,