t delay, her option, her
volition; taking this personal possession of what surrounded her was a
fair affirmation to start with; and she really didn't care if she made
it at the cost of alarms for Susie. Susie would wonder in due course
"whatever," as they said at the hotel, had become of her; yet this
would be nothing either, probably, to wonderments still in store.
Wonderments in truth, Milly felt, even now attended her steps: it was
quite as if she saw in people's eyes the reflection of her appearance
and pace. She found herself moving at times in regions visibly not
haunted by odd-looking girls from New York, duskily draped,
sable-plumed, all but incongruously shod and gazing about them with
extravagance; she might, from the curiosity she clearly excited in
byways, in side-streets peopled with grimy children and costermongers
carts, which she hoped were slums, literally have had her musket on her
shoulder, have announced herself as freshly on the warpath. But for the
fear of overdoing this character she would here and there have begun
conversation, have asked her way; in spite of the fact that, as that
would help the requirements of adventure, her way was exactly what she
wanted not to know. The difficulty was that she at last accidentally
found it; she had come out, she presently saw, at the Regent's Park,
round which, on two or three occasions with Kate Croy, her public
chariot had solemnly rolled. But she went into it further now; this was
the real thing; the real thing was to be quite away from the pompous
roads, well within the centre and on the stretches of shabby grass.
Here were benches and smutty sheep; here were idle lads at games of
ball, with their cries mild in the thick air; here were wanderers,
anxious and tired like herself; here doubtless were hundreds of others
just in the same box. Their box, their great common anxiety, what was
it, in this grim breathing-space, but the practical question of life?
They could live if they would; that is, like herself, they had been
told so; she saw them all about her, on seats, digesting the
information, feeling it altered, assimilated, recognising it again as
something, in a slightly different shape, familiar enough, the blessed
old truth that they would live if they could. All she thus shared with
them made her wish to sit in their company; which she so far did that
she looked for a bench that was empty, eschewing a still emptier chair
that she saw hard by and for