lly; but nothing, comparatively, had had so
much of the dignity of truth as the fact of Maud's fidelity to a
sentiment. That was what Susie was proud of, much more than of her
great place in the world, which she was moreover conscious of not as
yet wholly measuring. That was what was more vivid even than her
being--in senses more worldly and in fact almost in the degree of a
revelation--English and distinct and positive, with almost no inward,
but with the finest outward resonance.

Susan Shepherd's word for her, again and again, was that she was
"large"; yet it was not exactly a case, as to the soul, of echoing
chambers: she might have been likened rather to a capacious receptacle,
originally perhaps loose, but now drawn as tightly as possible over its
accumulated contents--a packed mass, for her American admirer, of
curious detail. When the latter good lady, at home, had handsomely
figured her friends as not small--which was the way she mostly figured
them--there was a certain implication that they were spacious because
they were empty. Mrs. Lowder, by a different law, was spacious because
she was full, because she had something in common, even in repose, with
a projectile, of great size, loaded and ready for use. That indeed, to
Susie's romantic mind, announced itself as half the charm of their
renewal--a charm as of sitting in springtime, during a long peace, on
the daisied, grassy bank of some great slumbering fortress. True to her
psychological instincts, certainly, Mrs. Stringham had noted that the
"sentiment" she rejoiced in on her old schoolmate's part was all a
matter of action and movement, was not, save for the interweaving of a
more frequent plump "dearest" than she would herself perhaps have used,
a matter of much other embroidery. She brooded, with interest, on this
further remark of race, feeling in her own spirit a different economy.
The joy, for her, was to know _why_ she acted--the reason was half the
business; whereas with Mrs. Lowder there might have been no reason:
"why" was the trivial seasoning-substance, the vanilla or the nutmeg,
omittable from the nutritive pudding without spoiling it. Mrs. Lowder's
desire was clearly sharp that their young companions should also
prosper together; and Mrs. Stringham's account of it all to Milly,
during the first days, was that when, at Lancaster Gate, she was not
occupied in telling, as it were, about her, she was occupied in hearing
much of the history of her