any name, her silence succeeded in passing muster
with her as the beginning of a new sort of fun. The
sort was all the newer by reason of its containing a
small element of anxiety: when she had gone in for
fun before it had been with her hands a little more
free. Yet it was, none the less, rather exciting to
be conscious of a still sharper reason for interest in
the handsome girl, as Kate continued, even now, pre
eminently to remain for her; and a reason this was
the great point of which the young woman herself
could have no suspicion. Twice over, thus, for two
or three hours together, Milly found herself seeing
Kate, quite fixing her in the light of the knowledge
that it was a face on which Mr. Densher's eyes had
more or less familiarly rested and which, by the same
token, had looked, rather more beautifully than less,
into his own. She pulled herself up indeed with the
thought that it had inevitably looked, as beautifully
as one would, into thousands of faces in which one
might one's self never trace it; but just the odd re
sult of the thought was to intensify for the girl that
side of her friend which she had doubtless already
been more prepared than she quite knew to think of
as the " other," the not wholly calculable. It was
fantastic, and Milly was aware of this; but the
other side was what had, of a sudden, been turned
straight towards her by the show of Mr. Densher's
propinquity. She hadn't the excuse of knowing it
for Kate's own, since nothing whatever as yet proved
it particularly to be such. Never mind; it was with

[[209]]

p208 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p209w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p210

v?