s distinct--by the way that in certain
connections the American mind broke down. It seemed at least--the
American mind as sitting there thrilled and dazzled in Milly--not to
understand English society without a separate confrontation with _all_
the cases. It couldn't proceed by--there was some technical term she
lacked until Milly suggested both analogy and induction, and then,
differently, instinct, none of which were right: it had to be led up
and introduced to each aspect of the monster, enabled to walk all round
it, whether for the consequent exaggerated ecstasy or for the still
more as appeared to this critic disproportionate shock. It might, the
monster, Kate conceded, loom large for those born amid forms less
developed and therefore no doubt less amusing; it might on some sides
be a strange and dreadful monster, calculated to devour the unwary, to
abase the proud, to scandalize the good; but if one had to live with it
one must, not to be for ever sitting up, learn how: which was virtually
in short to-night what the handsome girl showed herself as teaching.

She gave away publicly, in this process, Lancaster Gate and everything
it contained; she gave away, hand over hand, Milly's thrill continued
to note, Aunt Maud and Aunt Maud's glories and Aunt Maud's
complacencies; she gave herself away most of all, and it was naturally
what most contributed to her candour. She didn't speak to her friend
once more, in Aunt Maud's strain, of how they could scale the skies;
she spoke, by her bright, perverse preference on this occasion, of the
need, in the first place, of being neither stupid nor vulgar. It might
have been a lesson, for our young American, in the art of seeing things
as they were--a lesson so various and so sustained that the pupil had,
as we have shown, but receptively to gape. The odd thing furthermore
was that it could serve its purpose while explicitly disavowing every
personal bias. It wasn't that she disliked Aunt Maud, who was
everything she had on other occasions declared; but the dear woman,
ineffaceably stamped by inscrutable nature and a dreadful art,
wasn't--how _could_ she be?--what she wasn't. She wasn't any one. She
wasn't anything. She wasn't anywhere. Milly mustn't think it--one
couldn't, as a good friend, let her. Those hours at Matcham were
_inesperees,_ were pure manna from heaven; or if not wholly that
perhaps, with humbugging old Lord Mark as a backer, were vain as a
ground for hopes and ca