al affinity in the old days at the
Vevey school; whom she had written to, after their separation, with a
regularity that had at first faltered and then altogether failed, yet
that had been for the time quite a fine case of crude constancy; so
that it had in fact flickered up again of itself on the occasion of the
marriage of each. They had then once more fondly, scrupulously
written--Mrs. Lowder first; and even another letter or two had
afterwards passed. This, however, had been the end--though with no
rupture, only a gentle drop: Maud Manningham had made, she believed, a
great marriage, while she herself had made a small; on top of which,
moreover, distance, difference, diminished community and impossible
reunion had done the rest of the work. It was but after all these years
that reunion had begun to show as possible--if the other party to it,
that is, should be still in existence. That was exactly what it now
struck our friend as interesting to ascertain, as, with one aid and
another, she believed she might. It was an experiment she would at all
events now make if Milly didn't object.

Milly in general objected to nothing, and, though she asked a question
or two, she raised no present plea. Her questions--or at least her own
answers to them--kindled, on Mrs. Stringham's part, a backward train:
she hadn't known till tonight how much she remembered, or how fine it
might be to see what had become of large, high-coloured Maud, florid,
exotic and alien--which had been just the spell--even to the
perceptions of youth. There was the danger--she frankly touched
it--that such a temperament mightn't have matured, with the years, all
in the sense of fineness; it was the sort of danger that, in renewing
relations after long breaks, one had always to look in the face. To
gather in strayed threads was to take a risk--for which, however, she
was prepared if Milly was. The possible "fun," she confessed, was by
itself rather tempting; and she fairly sounded, with this--wound up a
little as she was--the note of fun as the harmless final right of fifty
years of mere New England virtue. Among the things she was afterwards
to recall was the indescribable look dropped on her, at this, by her
companion; she was still seated there between the candles and before
the finished supper, while Milly moved about, and the look was long to
figure for her as an inscrutable comment on _her_ notion of freedom.
Challenged, at any rate, as for the last w