jective; and our young woman had foreseen it of
her, on the spot, that she would often look so again.
It was exactly what she was doing this afternoon;
and Milly, who had amusements of thought that
were like the secrecies of a little girl playing with
dolls when conventionally " too big," could almost
settle to the game of what one would suppose her,
how one would place her, if one didn't know her.
She became thus, intermittently, a figure conditioned
only by the great facts of aspect, a figure to be waited
for, named and fitted. This was doubtless but a
way of feeling that it was of her essence to be pecul
iarly what the occasion, whatever it might be, de
manded when its demand was highest. There were
probably ways enough, on these lines, for such a con
sciousness; another of them would be, for instance,
to say that she was made for great social uses. Milly
was not wholly sure that she herself knew what great
social uses might be unless, as a good example,
exerting just that sort of glamour in just that sort
of frame were one of them: she would have fallen
back on knowing sufficiently that they existed at all
events for her friend. It imputed a primness, all
round, to be reduced but to saying, by way of a trans
lation of one's amusement, that she was always so
right since that, too often, was what the insupport-
ables themselves were; yet it was, in overflow to
Aunt Maud, what she had to content herself withal
save for the lame enhancement of saying she was
lovely. It served, all the same, the purpose, strength-

[[233]]

p232 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p233w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p234

v?