ptly changed the subject.

No, she didn't, as a rule, mind the past, because she was used to it and
understood it. It was a great concrete fact in her path that she had to
walk around every time she moved in any direction. But now, in the
light of the unhappy event that had summoned her from Italy,--the sudden
unanticipated news of her daughter's divorce from Horace Pursh and
remarriage with Wilbour Barkley--the past, her own poor miserable past,
started up at her with eyes of accusation, became, to her disordered
fancy, like the afflicted relative suddenly breaking away from nurses
and keepers and publicly parading the horror and misery she had, all the
long years, so patiently screened and secluded.

Yes, there it had stood before her through the agitated weeks since the
news had come--during her interminable journey from India, where Leila's
letter had overtaken her, and the feverish halt in her apartment in
Florence, where she had had to stop and gather up her possessions for a
fresh start--there it had stood grinning at her with a new balefillness
which seemed to say: "Oh, but you've got to look at me _now_, because
I'm not only your own past but Leila's present."

Certainly it was a master-stroke of those arch-ironists of the shears
and spindle to duplicate her own story in her daughter's. Mrs. Lidcote
had always somewhat grimly fancied that, having so signally failed to
be of use to Leila in other ways, she would at least serve her as a
warning. She had even abstained from defending herself, from making
the best of her case, had stoically refused to plead extenuating
circumstances, lest Leila's impulsive sympathy should lead to deductions
that might react disastrously on her own life. And now that very thing
had happened, and Mrs. Lidcote could hear the whole of New York saying
with one voice: "Yes, Leila's done just what her mother did. With such
an example what could you expect?"

Yet if she had been an example, poor woman, she had been an awful one;
she had been, she would have supposed, of more use as a deterrent than
a hundred blameless mothers as incentives. For how could any one who
had seen anything of her life in the last eighteen years have had the
courage to repeat so disastrous an experiment?

Well, logic in such cases didn't count, example didn't count, nothing
probably counted but having the same impulses in the blood; and that was
the dark inheritance she had bestowed upon her daughter. Leila h