to him but, oh, with how sneaking a hope that he
might pronounce her, as to all indispensables, a ver
itable young lioness! What indeed she was really
confronted with was the consciousness that he had
not, after all, pronounced her anything: she nursed
herself into the sense that he had beautifully got out
of it. Did he think, however, she wondered, that
he could keep out of it to the end? though, as she
weighed the question, she yet felt it a little unjust.
Milly weighed, in this extraordinary hour, questions
numerous and strange; but she had, happily, be
fore she moved, worked round to a simplification.
Stranger than anything, for instance, was the effect
of its rolling over her that, when one considered it,
he might perhaps have " got out " by one door but
to come in with a beautiful, beneficent dishonesty by
another. It kept her more intensely motionless
there that what he might fundamentally be " up to"
was some disguised intention of standing by her as a
friend. Wasn't that what women always said they
wanted to do when they deprecated the addresses of
gentlemen they couldn't more intimately go on with?
It was what they, no doubt, sincerely fancied they
could make of men of whom they couldn't make
husbands. And she didn't even reason that it was,
by a similar law, the expedient of doctors in general
for the invalids of whom they couldn't make pa
tients: she was somehow so sufficiently aware that
her doctor was however fatuous it might sound
exceptionally moved. This was the damning little

[[275]]

p274 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p275w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p276

v?