have been
expected to produce. Mrs. Lowder had improvised a "rush" for them, but
out of elements, as Milly was now a little more freely aware, somewhat
roughly combined. Therefore if at this very instant she had her reasons
for thinking of the parenthesis as about to close--reasons completely
personal--she had on behalf of her companion a divination almost as
deep. The parenthesis would close with this admirable picture, but the
admirable picture still would show Aunt Maud as not absolutely sure
either if she herself were destined to remain in it. What she was
doing, Milly might even not have escaped seeming to see, was to talk
herself into a sublimer serenity while she ostensibly talked Milly. It
was fine, the girl fully felt, the way she did talk _her,_ little as,
at bottom, our young woman needed it or found other persuasions at
fault. It was in particular during the minutes of her grateful
absorption of iced coffee--qualified by a sharp doubt of her
wisdom--that she most had in view Lord Mark's relation to her being
there, or at least to the question of her being amused at it. It
wouldn't have taken much by the end of five minutes quite to make her
feel that this relation was charming. It might, once more, simply have
been that everything, anything, was charming when one was so justly and
completely charmed; but, frankly, she had not supposed anything so
serenely sociable could define itself between them as the friendly
understanding that was at present somehow in the air. They were, many
of them together, near the marquee that had been erected on a stretch
of sward as a temple of refreshment and that happened to have the
property--which was all to the good of making Milly think of a
"durbar"; her iced coffee had been a consequence of this connection, in
which, further, the bright company scattered about fell thoroughly into
place. Certain of its members might have represented the contingent of
"native princes"--familiar, but scarce the less grandly gregarious
term!--and Lord Mark would have done for one of these even though for
choice he but presented himself as a supervisory friend of the family.
The Lancaster Gate family, he clearly intended, in which he included
its American recruits, and included above all Kate Croy--a young person
blessedly easy to take care of. She knew people, and people knew her,
and she was the handsomest thing there--this last a declaration made by
Milly, in a sort of soft mid-summer madn