It just faintly rankled in her that a person who was
good enough and to spare for Milly Theale shouldn't
be good enough for another girl; though, oddly
enough, she could easily have forgiven Mrs. Lowder
herself the impatience. Mrs. Lowder didn't feel it,
and Kate Croy felt it with ease; yet in the end, be
it added, she grasped the reason, and the reason en
riched her mind. Wasn't it sufficiently the reason
that the handsome girl was, with twenty other splen
did qualities, the least bit brutal too, and didn't she
suggest, as no one yet had ever done for her new
friend, that there might be a wild beauty in that, and
even a strange grace? Kate wasn't brutally brutal
which Milly had hitherto benightedly supposed
the only way; she wasn't even aggressively so, but
rather indifferently, defensively and, as might be
said, by the habit of anticipation. She simplified in
advance, was beforehand with her doubts, and knew
with singular quickness what she wasn t, as they
said in New York, going to like. In that way at
least people were clearly quicker in England than at
home; and Milly could quite see, after a little, how
such instincts might become usual in a world in
which dangers abounded. There were more dan
gers, clearly, round about Lancaster Gate than one
suspected in New York or could dream of in Boston.
At all events, with more sense of them, there were
more precautions, and it was a remarkable world
altogether in which there could be precautions, on
whatever ground, against Susie.

[[201]]

p200 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p201w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p202

v?