thought,
before his talk showed his cleverness, and yet each minute she believed
in it more, quite apart from what her hostess had told her on first
naming him. Perhaps he was one of the cases she had heard of at
home--those characteristic cases of people in England who concealed
their play of mind so much more than they showed it. Even Mr. Densher a
little did that. And what made Lord Mark, at any rate, so real either,
when this was a thing he so definitely insisted on? His type some how,
as by a life, a need, an intention of its own, insisted _for_ him; but
that was all. It was difficult to guess his age--whether he were a
young man who looked old or an old man who looked young; it seemed to
prove nothing, as against other things, that he was bald and, as might
have been said, slightly stale, or, more delicately perhaps, dry: there
was such a fine little fidget of preoccupied life in him, and his eyes,
at moments--though it was an appearance they could suddenly lose--were
as candid and clear as those of a pleasant boy. Very neat, very light,
and so fair that there was little other indication of his moustache
than his constantly feeling it--which was again boyish--he would have
affected her as the most intellectual person present if he had not
affected her as the most frivolous. The latter quality was rather in
his look than in anything else, though he constantly wore his double
eyeglass, which was, much more, Bostonian and thoughtful.

The idea of his frivolity had, no doubt, to do with his personal
designation, which represented--as yet, for our young woman, a little
confusedly--a connection with an historic patriciate, a class that, in
turn, also confusedly, represented an affinity with a social element
that she had never heard otherwise described than as "fashion." The
supreme social element in New York had never known itself but as
reduced to that category, and though Milly was aware that, as applied
to a territorial and political aristocracy, the label was probably too
simple, she had for the time none other at hand. She presently, it is
true, enriched her idea with the perception that her interlocutor was
indifferent; yet this, indifferent as aristocracies notoriously were,
saw her but little further, inasmuch as she felt that, in the first
place, he would much rather get on with her than not, and in the second
was only thinking of too many matters of his own. If he kept her in
view on the one hand and kept so