Page:The Wings of the Dove (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1902), Volume 2.djvu/160

 the language of London. Old friends, in fine, were in ambush, Mrs. Lowder's, Kate Croy's, her own; when the addresses were not in the language of London they were in the more insistent idioms of the American centres. The current was swollen even by Susie's social connections; so that there were days, at hotels, at Dolomite picnics, on lake steamers, when she could almost repay to Aunt Maud and Kate, with interest, the debt contracted by the London "success" to which they had opened the door.

Mrs. Lowder's success and Kate's, amid the shock of Milly's and Mrs. Stringham's compatriots, failed but little, really, of the concert-pitch; it had gone almost as fast as the boom, over the sea, of the last great native novel. Those ladies were "so different"—different, observably enough, from the ladies so appraising them; it being, throughout, a case mainly of ladies, of a dozen at once, sometimes, in Milly's apartment, pointing, also at once, that moral and many others. Milly's companions were acclaimed not only as perfectly fascinating in themselves, the nicest people yet known to the acclaimers, but as obvious helping hands, socially speaking, for the eccentric young woman, evident initiators and smoothers of her path, possible subduers of her eccentricity. Short intervals, to her own sense, stood now for great differences, and this renewed inhalation of her native air had some how left her to feel that she already, that she mainly, 150