United States or Kenya ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
"No one has ever wanted to keep me before." Looking always what was proper, her father looked now still more surprised than interested. "You've not had proposals?" He spoke as if that were incredible of Lionel Croy's daughter; as if indeed such an admission scarce consorted, even in filial intimacy, with her high spirit and general form. "Not from rich relations.
So the young man, ingenious but large, critical but ardent too, made out both his case and Kate Croy's. They had originally met before her mother's death an occasion marked for her as the last pleasure permitted by the approach of that event; after which the dark months had interposed a screen and, for all Kate knew, made the end one with the beginning.
"I'm putting you, you see, in relation with my entourage." It might have been for the joke of it too, by this time, that her eminent friend fell in. "But if this gentleman isn't of your 'entourage ? I mean if he's of what do you call her? Miss Croy's. Unless indeed you also take an interest in him." "Oh certainly I take an interest in him!" "You think there may be then some chance for him?"
The clear shadow, from whatever source projected, hung, at any rate, over Milly's companion the whole week, and Kate Croy's handsome face smiled out of it, under bland skylights, in the presence alike of old masters passive in their glory and of thoroughly new ones, the newest, who bristled restlessly with pins and brandished snipping shears.
The obscurity had reigned during the hour of their friends' visit, faintly clearing indeed while, in one of the rooms, Kate Croy's remarkable advance to her intensified the fact that Milly and the young man were conjoined in the other.
He waited at the window another moment and then faced his friend with a thought. "He will have proposed to Miss Croy. That's what has happened." Her reserve continued. "It's you who must judge." "Well, I do judge. Mrs. Lowder will have done so too only she, poor lady, wrong. Miss Croy's refusal of him will have struck him" Densher continued to make it out "as a phenomenon requiring a reason."
Lowder's, Kate Croy's, her own; when the addresses weren't in the language of London they were in the more insistent idioms of American centres.
Densher at her heels or, so oddly perhaps, at Miss Croy's heels, Miss Croy being at Milly's had contributed to this effect, though it was only with the lapse of the greater obscurity that Susie made that out.
Word Of The Day