It was not moreover by any means with not hav
ing the imagination of expenditure that she appeared
to charge her friend, but with not having the imagi
nation of terror, of thrift, the imagination or in any
degree the habit of a conscious dependence on others.
Such moments, when all Wigmore Street, for in
stance, seemed to rustle about and the pale girl her
self to be facing the different rustlers, usually so
undiscriminated, as individual Britons too, Britons
personal, parties to a relation and perhaps even in
trinsically remarkable such moments in especial de
termined in Kate a perception of the high happiness
of her companion's liberty. Milly's range was thus
immense; she had to ask nobody for anything, to
refer nothing to any one; her freedom, her fortune
and her fancy were her law; an obsequious world
surrounded her, she could sniff up at every step its
fumes. And Kate, in these days, was altogether in
the phase of forgiving her so much bliss; in the
phase moreover of believing that, should they con
tinue to go on together, she would abide in that gen
erosity. She had, at such a point as this, no suspi
cion of a rift within the lute by which we mean not
only none of anything's coming between them, but
none of any definite flaw in so much clearness of
quality. Yet, all the same, if Milly, at Mrs. Low-
der's banquet, had described herself to Lord Mark
as kindly used by the young woman on the other side
because of some faintly-felt special propriety in it,
so there really did match with this, privately, on the

[[194]]

p193 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p194w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p195

v?