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"Is that your impression of him?" "It's my impression, dearest, of you. You handle every one." Mrs. Lowder's eyes still rested, and Susan Shepherd now felt, for a wonder, not less sincere by seeing that she pleased her. But there was a great limitation. "I don't handle Kate." It suggested something that her visitor hadn't yet had from her something the sense of which made Mrs. Stringham gasp.
Lowder's about the steps and stages, in people's careers, that absence caused one to miss, and about the resulting frequent sense of meeting them further on; which, with some other matters also recalled, he took occasion to communicate to Milly.
It served, all the same, the purpose, strengthened the bond that for the time held the two ladies together, distilled in short its drop of rose-colour for Mrs. Lowder's own view.
It was the plain truth: he was on Mrs. Lowder's basis, the only one in question a very small quantity, and he did know, damnably, what made quantities large. He desired to be perfectly simple; yet in the midst of that effort a deeper apprehension throbbed. Aunt Maud clearly conveyed it, though he couldn't later on have said how.
This effect he had already noted and named: it was that of the attitude assumed by his friend in the presence of the degree of response on his part to Mrs. Lowder's welcome which she couldn't possibly have failed to notice. She had noticed it, and she had beautifully shown him so; wearing in its honour the finest shade of studied serenity, a shade almost of gaiety over the workings of time.
She was not only to quarrel with Merton Densher to oblige her five spectators with the Miss Condrips there were five; she was to set forth in pursuit of Lord Mark on some preposterous theory of the premium attached to success. Mrs. Lowder's hand had attached it, and it figured at the end of the course as a bell that would ring, break out into public clamour, as soon as touched.
Lowder's expense, which she would have none of; she wouldn't for the world have had him make any such point as that he wouldn't have launched them at Matcham or whatever it was he had done only for Aunt Maud's beaux yeux.
And I know George is perfectly furious about the whole business!" "But maybe the doctor won't let us go in, right in to her " A long-cherished grudge rose to the surface in Mrs. Lowder's energetic reply: "Well, I guess this is one time when the high-and-mighty Dr. Melton'll have to be shoved on one side, and if necessary I'll do the shoving!" "You feel justified?" "Justified! I should think I do!
Susan Shepherd, at this, for reasons not clear even to herself, was moved a little to caution. So she remained general. "He's charming." She had met Mrs. Lowder's eyes with that extreme pointedness in her own to which people resort when they are not quite candid a circumstance that had its effect. "Yes; he's charming."
Kate, to be properly stiff for both of them, would therefore have had to be selfish, have had to prefer an ideal of behaviour than which nothing, ever, was more selfish to the possibility of stray crumbs for the four small creatures. The tale of Mrs. Lowder's disgust at her elder niece's marriage to Mr. Condrip had lost little of its point; the incredibly fatuous behaviour of Mr.
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