Chapter 5 - Page 2

its rather dim windows. But this imagination--the fancy of a possible link with the remarkable young thing from New York--HAD mustered courage: had perched, on the instant, at the clearest lookout it could find, and might be said to have remained there till, only a few months later, it had caught, in surprise and joy, the unmistakeable flash of a signal.

Milly Theale had Boston friends, such as they were, and of recent making; and it was understood that her visit to them--a visit that was not to be meagre--had been undertaken, after a series of bereavements, in the interest of the particular peace that New York couldn't give. It was recognised, liberally enough, that there were many things--perhaps even too many--New York COULD give; but this was felt to make no difference in the important truth that what you had most to do, under the discipline of life, or of death, was really to feel your situation as grave. Boston could help you to that as nothing else could, and it had extended to Milly, by every presumption, some such measure of assistance. Mrs. Stringham was never to forget--for the moment had not faded, nor the infinitely fine vibration it set up in any degree ceased--her own first sight of the striking apparition, then unheralded and unexplained: the slim, constantly pale, delicately haggard, anomalously, agreeably angular young person, of not more than two-and-twenty summers, in spite of her marks, whose hair was somehow exceptionally red even for the real thing, which it innocently confessed to being, and whose clothes were remarkably black even for robes of mourning, which was the meaning they expressed. It was New York mourning, it was New York hair, it was a New York history, confused as yet, but multitudinous, of the loss of parents, brothers, sisters, almost every human appendage, all on a scale and with a sweep that had required the greater stage; it was a New York legend of affecting, of romantic isolation, and, beyond everything, it was by most accounts, in respect to the mass of money so piled on the girl's back, a set of New York possibilities. She was alone, she was stricken, she was rich, and in particular was strange--a combination in itself of a nature to engage Mrs. Stringham's attention. But it was the strangeness that most determined our good lady's sympathy, convinced as she had to be that it was greater than any one else--any one but the sole Susan Stringham--supposed. Susan privately settled it that Boston was not in the least seeing her, was only occupied with her seeing Boston, and that any assumed affinity between the two characters was delusive and vain. SHE was seeing her, and she had quite the finest moment of her life in now obeying the instinct to conceal the vision. She couldn't explain it--no one would understand. They would say clever Boston things--Mrs. Stringham was from Burlington Vermont, which she boldly upheld as the real heart of New England, Boston being "too far south"--but they would