stakably gay, and yet making it as soft as dusk.
Mrs. Stringham by this time understood everything, was more than ever
confirmed in wonder and admiration, in her view that it was life enough
simply to feel her companion's feelings; but there were special keys
she had not yet added to her bunch, impressions that, of a sudden, were
apt to affect her as new.

This particular day on the great Swiss road had been, for some reason,
full of them, and they referred themselves, provisionally, to some
deeper depth than she had touched--though into two or three such
depths, it must be added, she had peeped long enough to find herself
suddenly draw back. It was not Milly's unpacified state, in short, that
now troubled her--though certainly, as Europe was the great American
sedative, the failure was to some extent to be noted: it was the
suspected presence of something behind it--which, however, could
scarcely have taken its place there since their departure. What any
fresh motive of unrest could suddenly have sprung from was, in short,
not to be divined. It was but half an explanation to say that
excitement, for each of them, had naturally dropped, and that what they
had left behind, or tried to--the great serious facts of life, as Mrs.
Stringham liked to call them--was once more coming into sight as
objects loom through smoke when smoke begins to clear; for these were
general appearances from which the girl's own aspect, her really larger
vagueness, seemed rather to disconnect itself. The nearest approach to
a personal anxiety indulged in as yet by the elder lady was on her
taking occasion to wonder if what she had more than anything else got
hold of mightn't be one of the finer, one of the finest, one of the
rarest--as she called it so that she might call it nothing worse--cases
of American intensity. She had just had a moment of alarm--asked
herself if her young friend were merely going to treat her to some
complicated drama of nerves. At the end of a week, however, with their
further progress, her young friend had effectively answered the
question and given her the impression, indistinct indeed as yet, of
something that had a reality compared with which the nervous
explanation would have been coarse. Mrs. Stringham found herself from
that hour, in other words, in presence of an explanation that remained
a muffled and intangible form, but that, assuredly, should it take on
sharpness, would explain everything and more than everyt