Lord Mark was very well, but he wasn't the cleverest creature in England, and even if he had been he still wouldn't have been the most obliging.
He weighed it out in ounces, and indeed each of the pair was really waiting for what the other would put down.
"She has put down you." said Milly, attached to the subject still; "and I think what you mean is that, on the counter, she still keeps hold of you."
"Lest"—Kate took it up—"he should suddenly grab me and run?
Oh, as he isn't ready to run, he's much less ready, naturally, to grab.
I am—you're so far right as that—on the counter, when I'm not in the shop-window; in and out of which I'm thus conveniently, commercially whisked: the essence, all of it, of my position, and the price, as properly, of my aunt's protection."
Lord Mark was substantially what she had begun with as soon as they were alone; the impression was even yet with Milly of her having sounded his name, having imposed it, as a topic, in direct opposition to the other name that Mrs. Lowder had left in the air and that all her own look, as we have seen, kept there at first for her companion.
The immediate strange effect had been that of her consciously needing, as it were, an alibi—which, successfully, she so found.
She had worked it to the end, ridden it to and fro across the course marked for Milly by Aunt Maud, and now she had quite, so to speak, broken it in.
"The bore is that if she wants him so much—wants him, heaven forgive her! for me—he has put us all out, since your arrival, by wanting somebody else.
I don't mean somebody else than you."
Milly threw off the charm sufficiently to shake her head.
"Then I haven't made out who it is.
If I'm any part of his alternative he had better stop where he is."
"Truly, truly?—always, always?"
Milly tried to insist with an equal gaiety.
"Would you like me to swear?"
Kate appeared for a moment—though that was doubtless but gaiety too—to think.
"Haven't we been swearing enough?"
"You have perhaps, but I haven't, and I ought to give you the equivalent.
At any rate there it is.
Truly, truly as you say—'always, always.'
So I'm not in the way."
"Thanks," said Kate—"but that doesn't help me."
"Oh, it's as simplifying for him that I speak of it."
"The difficulty really is that he's a person with so many ideas that it's particularly hard to simplify for him.
That's exactly of course what Aunt Maud has been trying.
He won't," Kate firmly continued, "make up his mind about me."
"Well," Milly smiled, "give him time."
Her friend met it in perfection.
"One is doing that—one is. But one remains, all the same, but one of his ideas."
"There's no harm in that," Milly returned, "if you come out in the end as the best of them.
What's a man," she pursued, "especially an ambitious one, without a variety of ideas?"
"No doubt.
The more the merrier." And Kate looked at her grandly. "One can but hope to come out, and do nothing to prevent it."
All of which made for the impression, fantastic or not, of the alibi.
The splendour, the grandeur were, for Milly, the bold ironic spirit behind it, so interesting too in itself.
What, moreover, was not less interesting was the fact, as our young woman noted it, that Kate confined her point to the difficulties, so far as she was concerned, raised only by Lord Mark.
She referred now to none that her own taste might present; which circumstance again played its little part.
She was doing what she liked in respect to another person, but she was in no way committed to the other person, and her furthermore talking of Lord Mark as not young and not true were only the signs of her clear self-consciousness, were all in the line of her slightly hard, but scarce the less graceful extravagance.
She didn't wish to show too much her consent to be arranged for, but that was a different thing from not wishing sufficiently to give it.
There was something moreover, on it all, that Milly still found occasion to say,
"If your aunt has been, as you tell me, put out by me, I feel that she has remained remarkably kind."
"Oh, but she has—whatever might have happened in that respect—plenty of use for you!
You put her in, my dear, more than you put her out.
You don't half see it, but she has clutched your petticoat.
You can do anything—you can do, I mean, lots that we can't.
You're an outsider, independent and standing by yourself; you're not hideously relative to tiers and tiers of others." And Kate, facing in that direction, went further and further; wound up, while Milly gaped, with extraordinary words. "We're of no use to you—it's decent to tell you.
You'd be of use to us, but that's a different matter.
My honest advice to you would be—" she went indeed all lengths—"to drop us while you can.