e the return of their companions--done nothing to intensify it. If
she was most aware only afterwards, under the long, discurtained ordeal
of the morrow's dawn, that was because she had really, till their
evening's end came, ceased, after a little, to miss anything from their
ostensible comfort. What was behind showed but in gleams and glimpses;
what was in front never at all confessed to not holding the stage.
Three minutes had not passed before Milly quite knew she should have
done nothing Aunt Maud had just asked her. She knew it moreover by much
the same light that had acted for her with that lady and with Sir Luke
Strett. It pressed upon her then and there that she was still in a
current determined, through her indifference, timidity, bravery,
generosity--she scarce could say which--by others; that not she but the
current acted, and that somebody else, always, was the keeper of the
lock or the dam. Kate for example had but to open the flood-gate: the
current moved in its mass--the current, as it had been, of her doing as
Kate wanted. What, somehow, in the most extraordinary way in the world,
_had_ Kate wanted but to be, of a sudden, more interesting than she had
ever been? Milly, for their evening then, quite held her breath with
the appreciation of it. If she hadn't been sure her companion would
have had nothing, from her moments with Mrs. Lowder, to go by, she
would almost have seen the admirable creature "cutting in" to
anticipate a danger. This fantasy indeed, while they sat together,
dropped after a little; even if only because other fantasies multiplied
and clustered, making fairly, for our young woman, the buoyant medium
in which her friend talked and moved. They sat together, I say, but
Kate moved as much as she talked; she figured there, restless and
charming, just perhaps a shade perfunctory, repeatedly quitting her
place, taking slowly, to and fro, in the trailing folds of her light
dress, the length of the room, and almost avowedly performing for the
pleasure of her hostess.

Mrs. Lowder had said to Milly at Matcham that she and her niece, as
allies, could practically conquer the world; but though it was a speech
about which there had even then been a vague, grand glamour, the girl
read into it at present more of an approach to a meaning. Kate, for
that matter, by herself, could conquer anything, and _she,_ Milly
Theale, was probably concerned with the "world" only as the small scrap
of it that most imp