in England, apparently, the social situation of sisters
could be opposed, how common ground, for a place
in the world, could quite fail them: a state of things
sagely perceived to be involved in an hierarchical, an
aristocratic order. Just whereabouts in the order
Mrs. Lowder had established her niece was a ques
tion not wholly void, as yet, no doubt, of ambiguity
though Milly was withal sure Lord Mark could
exactly have fixed the point if he would, fixing it at
the same time for Aunt Maud herself; but it was
clear that Mrs. Condrip was, as might have been said,
in quite another geography. She would not, in
short, have been to be found on the same social map,
and it was as if her visitors had turned over page
after page together before the final relief of their
benevolent "Here!" The interval was bridged,
of course, but the bridge, verily, was needed, and the
impression left Milly to wonder whether, in the gen
eral connection, it were of bridges or of intervals
that the spirit not locally disciplined would find it
self most conscious. It was as if at home, by con
trast, there were neither neither the difference
itself, from position to position, nor, on either side,
and particularly on one, the awfully good manner,
the conscious sinking of a consciousness, that made
up for it. The conscious sinking, at all events, and
the awfully good manner, the difference, the bridge,
the interval, the skipped leaves of the social atlas
these, it was to be confessed, had a little, for our
young lady, in default of stouter stuff, to work them-

[[211]]

p210 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p211w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p212

v?