"Oh, she's grand," the young man conceded;
"she's on the scale, altogether, of the car of Jug
gernaut which was a kind of image that came to
me yesterday while I waited for her at Lancaster
Gate. The things in your drawing-room there
were like the forms of the strange idols, the mystic
excrescences, with which one may suppose the front
of the car to bristle."

"Yes, aren't they? " the girl returned; and they
had, over all that aspect of their wonderful lady,
one of those deep and free interchanges that made
everything but confidence a false note for them.
There were complications, there were questions;
but they were so much more together than they
were anything else. Kate uttered for a while no
word of refutation of Aunt Maud's " big " diplo
macy, and they left it there, as they would have left
any other fine product, for a monument to her
powers. But, Densher related further, he had had
in other respects too the car of Juggernaut to face;
he omitted nothing from his account of his visit,
least of all the way Aunt Maud had frankly at last
though indeed only under artful pressure fallen
foul of his very type, his want of the right marks,
his foreign accidents, his queer antecedents. She
had told him he was but half a Briton, which, he
granted Kate, would have been dreadful if he hadn't
so let himself in for it.

"I was really curious, you see," he explained,
"to find out from her what sort of queer creature,

[[101]]

p100 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p101w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p102

v?