her was, again, yet irrepressibly again, that the
image presented to her, the splendid young woman
who looked so particularly handsome in impatience,
with the fine freedom of her signal, was the peculiar
property of somebody else's vision, that this fine
freedom in short was the fine freedom she showed
Mr. Densher. Just so was how she looked to
him, and just so was how Milly was held by
her held as by the strange sense of seeing through
that distant person's eyes. It lasted, as usual, the
strange sense, but fifty seconds; yet in so lasting
it produced an effect. It produced in fact more
than one, and we take them in their order. The
first was that it struck our young woman as ab
surd to say that a girl's looking so to a man could
possibly be without connections; and the second was
that by the time Kate had got into the room Milly
was in mental possession of the main connection it
must have for herself.

She produced this commodity on the spot pro
duced it, that is, in straight response to Kate's frank
"Well, what? " The inquiry bore of course, with
Kate's eagerness, on the issue of the morning's
scene, the great man's latest wisdom, and it doubt
less affected Milly a little as the cheerful demand for
news is apt to affect troubled spirits when news is
not, in one of the neater forms, prepared for delivery.
She couldn't have said what it was exactly that, on
the instant, determined her; the nearest description
of it would perhaps have been as the more vivid im-

[[281]]

p280 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p281w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p282

v?