I feel Sir Luke will have more; he won't have put me off with anything inadequate.
I'm to see him again; he as good as told me that he'll wish it.
So it won't be for nothing."
"Then what will it be for?
Do you mean he has somebody of his own to propose?
Do you mean you told him nothing?"
Mrs. Stringham dealt with these questions.
"I showed him I understood him.
That was all I could do.
I didn't feel at liberty to be explicit; but I felt, even though his visit so upset me, the comfort of what I had from you night before last."
"What I spoke to you of in the carriage when we had left her with Kate?"
"You had seen, apparently, in three minutes.
And now that he's here, now that I've met him and had my impression of him, I feel," said Mrs. Stringham, "that you've been magnificent."
"Of course I've been magnificent.
When," asked Maud Manningham, "was I anything else?
But Milly won't be, you know, if she marries Merton Densher."
"Oh it's always magnificent to marry the man one loves.
But we're going fast!" Mrs. Stringham woefully smiled.
"The thing is to go fast if I see the case right.
What had I after all but my instinct of that on coming back with you, night before last, to pick up Kate?
I felt what I felt—I knew in my bones the man had returned."
"That's just where, as I say, you're magnificent.
But wait," said Mrs. Stringham, "till you've seen him."
"I shall see him immediately"—Mrs. Lowder took it up with decision. "What is then," she asked, "your impression?"
Mrs. Stringham's impression seemed lost in her doubts.
"How can he ever care for her?"
Her companion, in her companion's heavy manner, sat on it.
"By being put in the way of it."
"For God's sake then," Mrs. Stringham wailed, "put him in the way!
You have him, one feels, in your hand."
Maud Lowder's eyes at this rested on her friend's.
"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.
"Do you mean Kate cares for him?"
That fact the lady of Lancaster Gate had up to this moment, as we know, enshrouded, and her friend's quick question had produced a change in her face.
She blinked—then looked at the question hard; after which, whether she had inadvertently betrayed herself or had only reached a decision and then been affected by the quality of Mrs. Stringham's surprise, she accepted all results.
What took place in her for Susan Shepherd was not simply that she made the best of them, but that she suddenly saw more in them to her purpose than she could have imagined.
A certain impatience in fact marked in her this transition: she had been keeping back, very hard, an important truth, and wouldn't have liked to hear that she hadn't concealed it cleverly.
Susie nevertheless felt herself pass as not a little of a fool with her for not having thought of it.
What Susie indeed, however, most thought of at present, in the quick, new light of it, was the wonder of Kate's dissimulation.
She had time for that view while she waited for an answer to her cry.
"Kate thinks she cares.
But she's mistaken.
And no one knows it." These things, distinct and responsible, were Mrs. Lowder's retort.
Yet they weren't all of it. "You don't know it—that must be your line.