was very much pushed to the wall; but he was
also to know that Mrs. Stringham had secretly resented them, Mrs.
Stringham holding the opinion, of which he was ultimately to have a
glimpse, that all the Kate Croys in Christendom were but dust for the
feet of her Milly. That, it was true, would be what she must reveal
only when driven to her last entrenchments and well cornered in her
passion--the rare passion of friendship, the sole passion of her little
life save the one other, more imperturbably cerebral, that she
entertained for the art of Guy de Maupassant. She slipped in the
observation that her Milly was incapable of change, was just exactly,
on the contrary, the same Milly; but this made little difference in the
drift of Kate's contention. She was perfectly kind to Susie: it was as
if she positively knew her as handicapped for any disagreement by
feeling that she, Kate, had "type," and by being committed to
admiration of type. Kate had occasion subsequently--she found it
somehow--to mention to our young man Milly's having spoken to her of
this view on the good lady's part. She would like--Milly had had it
from her--to put Kate Croy in a book and see what she could so do with
her. "Chop me up fine or serve me whole"--it was a way of being got at
that Kate professed she dreaded. It would be Mrs. Stringham's, however,
she understood, because Mrs. Stringham, oddly, felt that with such
stuff as the strange English girl was made of, stuff that (in spite of
Maud Manningham, who was full of sentiment) she had never known, there
was none other to be employed. These things were of later evidence, yet
Densher might even then have felt them in the air. They were
practically in it already when Kate, waiving the question of her
friend's chemical change, wound up with the comparatively
unobjectionable proposition that he must now, having missed so much,
take them all up, on trust, further on. He met it peacefully, a little
perhaps as an example to Mrs. Stringham--"Oh as far on as you like!"
This even had its effect: Mrs. Stringham appropriated as much of it as
might be meant for herself. The nice thing about her was that she could
measure how much; so that by the time dinner was over they had really
covered ground.

IV

The younger of the other men, it afterwards appeared, was most in his
element at the piano; so that they had coffee and comic songs
upstairs--the gentlemen, temporarily relinquished, submitting easily in
this