those of Americans at their best, without being
vulgar, legitimating amiability and helping to pass it off. In his
appreciation of these redundancies he dressed out for her the
compassion he so signally permitted himself to waste; but its operation
for herself was as directly divesting, denuding, exposing. It reduced
her to her ultimate state, which was that of a poor girl with her rent
to pay for example--staring before her in a great city. Milly had her
rent to pay, her rent for her future; everything else but how to meet
it fell away from her in pieces, in tatters. This was the sensation the
great man had doubtless not purposed. Well, she must go home, like the
poor girl, and see. There might after all be ways; the poor girl too
would be thinking. It came back for that matter perhaps to views
already presented. She looked about her again, on her feet, at her
scattered, melancholy comrades--some of them so melancholy as to be
down on their stomachs in the grass, turned away, ignoring, burrowing;
she saw once more, with them, those two faces of the question between
which there was so little to choose for inspiration. It was perhaps
superficially more striking that one could live if one would; but it
was more appealing, insinuating, irresistible, in short, that one would
live if one could.

She found after this, for the day or two, more amusement than she had
ventured to count on in the fact, if it were not a mere fancy, of
deceiving Susie; and she presently felt that what made the difference
was the mere fancy--as this _was_ one--of a countermove to her great
man. His taking on himself--should he do so--to get at her companion
made her suddenly, she held, irresponsible, made any notion of her own
all right for her; though indeed at the very moment she invited herself
to enjoy this impunity she became aware of new matter for surprise, or
at least for speculation. Her idea would rather have been that Mrs.
Stringham would have looked at her hard--her sketch of the grounds of
her long, independent excursion showing, she could feel, as almost
cynically superficial. Yet the dear woman so failed, in the event, to
avail herself of any right of criticism that it was sensibly tempting,
for an hour, to wonder if Kate Croy had been playing perfectly fair.
Hadn't she possibly, from motives of the highest benevolence,
promptings of the finest anxiety, just given poor Susie what she would
have called the straight tip? It must immedia