herself as handsome, no doubt, but as hard, and
felt herself as clever but as cold; and as so much
too imperfectly ambitious, futhermore, that it was
a pity, for a quiet life, she couldn't settle to be
either finely or stupidly indifferent. Her intelli
gence sometimes kept her still too still but her
want of it was restless; so that she got the good,
it seemed to her, of neither extreme. She saw her
self at present, none the less, in a situation, and
even her sad, disillusioned mother, dying, but with
Aunt Maud interviewing the nurse on the stairs,
had not failed to remind her that it was of the
essence of situations to be, under Providence,
worked. The dear woman had died in the belief
that she was actually working the one then pro
duced.

Kate took one of her walks with Densher just
after her visit to Mr. Croy; but most of it went, as
usual, to their sitting in talk. They had, under the
trees, by the lake, the air of old friends phases of
apparent earnestness, in particular, in which they
might have been settling every question in their vast
young world; and periods of silence, side by side,
perhaps even more, when " a long engagement!"
would have been the final reading of the" signs on
the part of a passer struck with them, as it was so
easy to be. They would have presented themselves
thus as very old friends rather than as young per
sons who had met for the first time but a year be
fore and had spent most of the interval without

[[66]]

p065 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p066w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p067

v?