ded this with the singular,
silent intensity of purpose that she did not even know to be
characteristic of herself, though it had carried her through a severe
ordeal at the convent; for Mary had never yet studied her own emotions
or her own nature. The instant that the Home-Davises, mother and
daughter, greeted her in their chilly drawing-room, she lost all doubt
as to whether she should leave London with or without them. It would be
without them that she must go. How she was to contrive this, the girl
did not know in the least, but she knew that the thing would have to be
done. She could not see Italy in the company of these women.

Suddenly Mary remembered them both quite well, though they had not met
since a visit the mother and daughter had made to Scotland when she was
seven years old, before convent days. She recalled her aunt's way of
holding out a hand, like an offering of cold fish. And she remembered
how the daughter was patterned after the mother: large, light eyes, long
features of the horse type, prominent teeth, thin, consciously
virtuous-looking figure, and all the rest.

They had the sort of drawing-room that such women might be expected to
have, of the coldest grays and greens, with no individuality of
decoration. The whole house was the same, cheerless and depressing even
to those familiar with London in a November fog, but blighting to one
who knew not London in any weather. Even the servants seemed cold,
mechanical creatures, made of well-oiled steel or iron; and when Lady
MacMillan had driven off to a hotel, Mary cried heartily in her own
bleak room, with motor-omnibuses roaring and snorting under her windows.

At dinner, which was more or less cold, like everything else, there was
talk of the cousin who had left Mary a legacy of fifty thousand pounds;
and it was easy to divine in tone, if not in words, that the
Home-Davises felt deeply aggrieved because the money had not come to
them. This cousin had lived in the Cromwell Road house during the last
invalid years of her life, and had given them to understand that Elinor
was to have almost, if not quite, everything. The poor lady had died, it
seemed, in the room which Mary now occupied, probably in the same bed.
Mary deeply pitied her if she had been long in dying. The wall-paper was
atrocious, with a thousand hideous faces to be worried out of it by
tired eyes. The girl had wondered why the money had been left entirely
to her, but now she guessed