large for those born amid forms less developed and
therefore no doubt less amusing; it might on some
sides be a strange and dreadful monster, calculated
to devour the unwary, to abase the proud, to scandal
ise the good; but if one had to live with it one must,
not to be for ever sitting up, learn how: which was
virtually in short to-night what the handsome girl
showed herself as teaching.

She gave away publicly, in this process, Lancaster
Gate and everything it contained; she gave away,
hand over hand, Milly's thrill continued to note,
Aunt Maud and Aunt Maud's glories and Aunt
Maud's complacencies; she gave herself away most
of all, and it was naturally what most contributed to
her candour. She didn't speak to her friend once
more, in Aunt Maud's strain, of how they could scale
the skies; she spoke, by her bright, perverse prefer
ence on this occasion, of the need, in the first place,
of being neither stupid nor vulgar. It might have
been a lesson, for our young American, in the art of
seeing things as they were a lesson so various and
so sustained that the pupil had, as we have shown,
but receptively to gape. The odd thing furthermore
was that it could serve its purpose while explicitly
disavowing every personal bias. It wasn't that she
disliked Aunt Maud, who was everything she had on
other occasions declared; but the dear woman, inef-
faceably stamped by inscrutable nature and a dread
ful art, wasn't how could she be? what she
wasn t. She wasn't any one. She wasn't anything.

[[303]]

p302 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p303w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p304

v?