the two ladies who,
characteristically, had braved a good deal of possibly interested
remonstrance were finding themselves, as their adventure turned out,
wonderfully sustained. It was the judgment of the head-waiters and
other functionaries on the Italian lakes that approved itself now as
interested; they themselves had been conscious of impatiences, of
bolder dreams--at least the younger had; so that one of the things they
made out together--making out as they did an endless variety--was that
in those operatic palaces of the Villa d'Este, of Cadenabbia, of
Pallanza and Stresa, lone women, however reinforced by a
travelling-library of instructive volumes, were apt to be beguiled and
undone. Their flights of fancy moreover had been modest; they had for
instance risked nothing vital in hoping to make their way by the
Bruenig. They were making it in fact happily enough as we meet them, and
were only wishing that, for the wondrous beauty of the early
high-climbing spring, it might have been longer and the places to pause
and rest more numerous.

Such at least had been the intimated attitude of Mrs. Stringham, the
elder of the companions, who had her own view of the impatiences of the
younger, to which, however, she offered an opposition but of the most
circuitous. She moved, the admirable Mrs. Stringham, in a fine cloud of
observation and suspicion; she was in the position, as she believed, of
knowing much more about Milly Theale than Milly herself knew, and yet
of having to darken her knowledge as well as make it active. The woman
in the world least formed by nature, as she was quite aware, for
duplicities and labyrinths, she found herself dedicated to personal
subtlety by a new set of circumstances, above all by a new personal
relation; had now in fact to recognise that an education in the
occult--she could scarce say what to call it--had begun for her the day
she left New York with Mildred. She had come on from Boston for that
purpose; had seen little of the girl--or rather had seen her but
briefly, for Mrs. Stringham, when she saw anything at all, saw much,
saw everything--before accepting her proposal; and had accordingly
placed herself, by her act, in a boat that she more and more estimated
as, humanly speaking, of the biggest, though likewise, no doubt, in
many ways, by reason of its size, of the safest. In Boston, the winter
before, the young lady in whom we are interested had, on the spot,
deeply, yet almost taci