had lost any misgiving she had felt at first, in the
delight of seeing Clementina take the world as if she
had thought it would always behave as amiably as that,
and as if she had forgotten her unkind experiences
to the contrary. She knew from Mrs. Lander how
the girls at their hotel had left her out, but Miss
Milray could not see that Clementina met them with
rancor, when her authority brought them together.
If the child was humiliated by her past in the gross
lonely luxury of Mrs. Lander’s life or the unconscious
poverty of her own home, she did not show it in the
presence of the world that now opened its arms to
her. She remained so tranquil in the midst of
all the novel differences, that it made her friend
feel rather vulgar in her anxieties for her, and it
was not always enough to find that she had not gone
wrong simply because she had hold still, and had the
gift of waiting for things to happen. Sometimes
when Miss Milray had almost decided that her passivity
was the calm of a savage, she betrayed so sweet and
grateful a sense of all that was done for her, that
her benefactress decided that, she was not rustic,
but was sylvan in a way of her own, and not so much
ignorant as innocent. She discovered that she
was not ignorant even of books, but with no literary
effect from them she had transmitted her reading into
the substance of her native gentleness, and had both
ideas and convictions. When Clementina most affected
her as an untried wilderness in the conventional things
she most felt her equality to any social fortune that
might befall her, and then she would have liked to
see her married to a title, and taking the glory of
this world with an unconsciousness that experience
would never wholly penetrate. But then again
she felt that this would be somehow a profanation,
and she wanted to pack her up and get her back to
Middlemount before anything of the kind should happen.
She gave Milray these impressions of Clementina in
the letter she wrote to thank him for her, and to scold
him for sending the girl to her. She accused
him of wishing to get off on her a riddle which he
could not read himself; but she owned that the charm
of Clementina’s mystery was worth a thousand
times the fatigue of trying to guess her out and that
she was more and more infatuated with her every day.
In the meantime, Miss Milray’s little dance grew upon her till it became a very large one that filled her villa to overflowing when the time came for it. She lived on one of the fine avenues of the Oltrarno region, laid out in the brief period of prosperity which Florence enjoyed as the capital of Italy. The villa was built at that time, and it was much newer than the house on Seventeenth street in New York, where she spent the girlhood that had since prolonged itself beyond middle life with her. She had first lived abroad in the Paris of the Second Empire, and she had been one winter in Rome, but she had settled definitely in Florence before London became