which she would have paid, with
superiority, a fee.

The last scrap of superiority had soon enough left her, if only because
she before long knew herself for more tired than she had proposed. This
and the charm, after a fashion, of the situation in itself made her
linger and rest; there was a sort of spell in the sense that nobody in
the world knew where she was. It was the first time in her life that
this had happened; somebody, everybody appeared to have known before,
at every instant of it, where she was; so that she was now suddenly
able to put it to herself that that hadn't been a life. This present
kind of thing therefore might be--which was where precisely her
distinguished friend seemed to be wishing her to come out. He wished
her also, it was true, not to make, as she was perhaps doing now, too
much of her isolation; at the same time however as he clearly desired
to deny her no decent source of interest. He was interested--she
arrived at that--in her appealing to as many sources as possible; and
it fairly filtered into her, as she sat and sat, that he was
essentially propping her up. Had she been doing it herself she would
have called it bolstering--the bolstering that was simply for the weak;
and she thought and thought as she put together the proofs that it was
as one of the weak he was treating her. It was of course as one of the
weak that she had gone to him--but, oh, with how sneaking a hope that
he might pronounce her, as to all indispensables, a veritable young
lioness! What indeed she was really confronted with was the
consciousness that he had not, after all, pronounced her anything: she
nursed herself into the sense that he had beautifully got out of it.
Did he think, however, she wondered, that he could keep out of it to
the end?--though, as she weighed the question, she yet felt it a little
unjust. Milly weighed, in this extraordinary hour, questions numerous
and strange; but she had, happily, before she moved, worked round to a
simplification. Stranger than anything, for instance, was the effect of
its rolling over her that, when one considered it, he might perhaps
have "got out" by one door but to come in with a beautiful, beneficent
dishonesty by another. It kept her more intensely motionless there that
what he might fundamentally be "up to" was some disguised intention of
standing by her as a friend. Wasn't that what women always said they
wanted to do when they deprecated the addresses of gentl