existing
only as some one who could be financially heard from. The mother, the
puffed and composed whiteness of whose hair had no relation to her
apparent age, showed a countenance almost chemically clean and dry; her
companions wore an air of vague resentment humanised by fatigue; and
the three were equally adorned with short cloaks of coloured cloth
surmounted by little tartan hoods. The tartans were doubtless
conceivable as different, but the cloaks, curiously, only thinkable as
one. "Handsome? Well, if you choose to say so." It was the mother who
had spoken, who herself added, after a pause during which Milly took
the reference as to a picture: "In the English style." The three pair
of eyes had converged, and their possessors had for an instant rested,
with the effect of a drop of the subject, on this last
characterisation--with that, too, of a gloom not less mute in one of
the daughters than murmured in the other. Milly's heart went out to
them while they turned their backs; she said to herself that they ought
to have known her, that there was something between them they might
have beautifully put together. But she had lost _them_ also--they were
cold; they left her in her weak wonder as to what they had been looking
at. The "handsome" disposed her to turn--all the more that the "English
style" would be the English school, which she liked; only she saw,
before moving, by the array on the side facing her, that she was in
fact among small Dutch pictures. The action of this was again
appreciable--the dim surmise that it wouldn't then be by a picture that
the spring in the three ladies had been pressed. It was at all events
time she should go, and she turned as she got on her feet. She had had
behind her one of the entrances and various visitors who had come in
while she sat, visitors single and in pairs--by one of the former of
whom she felt her eyes suddenly held.

This was a gentleman in the middle of the place, a gentleman who had
removed his hat and was for a moment, while he glanced, absently, as
she could see, at the top tier of the collection, tapping his forehead
with his pocket-handkerchief. The occupation held him long enough to
give Milly time to take for granted--and a few seconds sufficed--that
his face was the object just observed by her friends. This could only
have been because she concurred in their tribute, even qualified, and
indeed "the English style" of the gentleman--perhaps by instant
contrast