ences, with their bewildering immensities, their con
founding moneyed New York, their excitements of
high pressure, their opportunities of wild freedom,
their record of used-up relatives, parents, clever,
eager, fair, slim brothers these the most loved all
engaged, as well as successive superseded guardians,
in a high extravagance of speculation and dissipation
that had left this exquisite being her black dress, her
white face and her vivid hair as the mere last broken
link: such a picture quite threw into the shade
the brief biography, however sketchily amplified,
of a mere middle-class nobody in Bayswater. And
though that indeed might be but a Bayswater way
of putting it, in addition to which Milly was in the
stage of interest in Bayswater ways, this critic so
far prevailed that, like Mrs. Stringham herself, she
fairly got her companion to accept from her that
she was quite the nearest approach to a practical
princess Bayswater could hope ever to know. It
was a fact it became one at the end of three days
that Milly actually began to borrow from the hand
some girl a sort of view of her state; the handsome
girl's impression of it was clearly so sincere. This
impression was a tribute, a tribute positively to
power, power the source of which was the last thing
Kate treated as a mystery. There were passages,
under all their skylights, the succession of their shops
being large, in which the latter's easy, yet the least
bit dry manner sufficiently gave out that if she had
had so deep a pocket!

[[193]]

p192 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p193w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p194

v?