the cool upper air and of everything else that hung
like an indestructible scent to the torn garment of
youth the taste of honey and the luxury of milk,
the sound of cattle-bells and the rush of streams, the
fragrance of trodden balms and the dizziness of deep
gorges.

Milly clearly felt these things too, but they af
fected her companion at moments that was quite
the way Mrs. Stringham would have expressed it
as the princess in a conventional tragedy might
have affected the confidant if a personal emotion
had ever been permitted to the latter. That a prin
cess could only be a princess was a truth with which,
essentially, a confidant, however responsive, had to
live. Mrs. Stringham was a woman of the world,
but Milly Theale was a princess, the only one she
A had yet had to deal with, and this in its way, too,
made all the difference. It was a perfectly definite
doom for the wearer it was for every one else
a perfectly palpable quality. It might have been,
possibly, with its involved loneliness and other mys
teries, the weight under which she fancied her com
panion's admirable head occasionally, and ever so
submissively, bowed. Milly had quite assented at
luncheon to their staying over, and had left her to
look at rooms, settle questions, arrange about their
keeping on their carnage and horses; cares that
had now moreover fallen to Mrs. Stringham as a
matter of course and that yet for some reason, on
this occasion particularly, brought home to her all

[[134]]

p133 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p134w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p135

v?