breast, and her child's "It's all right, you old darling!" in her
ears, every other feeling was lost in the deep sense of well-being that
only Leila's hug could give.

The sense was still with her, warming her veins and pleasantly
fluttering her heart, as she went up to her room after luncheon. A
little constrained by the presence of visitors, and not altogether sorry
to defer for a few hours the "long talk" with her daughter for which she
somehow felt herself tremulously unready, she had withdrawn, on the plea
of fatigue, to the bright luxurious bedroom into which Leila had again
and again apologized for having been obliged to squeeze her. The room
was bigger and finer than any in her small apartment in Florence; but it
was not the standard of affluence implied in her daughter's tone about
it that chiefly struck her, nor yet the finish and complexity of its
appointments. It was the look it shared with the rest of the house, and
with the perspective of the gardens beneath its windows, of being part
of an "establishment"--of something solid, avowed, founded on sacraments
and precedents and principles. There was nothing about the place, or
about Leila and Wilbour, that suggested either passion or peril: their
relation seemed as comfortable as their furniture and as respectable as
their balance at the bank.

This was, in the whole confusing experience, the thing that confused
Mrs. Lidcote most, that gave her at once the deepest feeling of security
for Leila and the strongest sense of apprehension for herself. Yes,
there was something oppressive in the completeness and compactness of
Leila's well-being. Ide had been right: her daughter did not need her.
Leila, with her first embrace, had unconsciously attested the fact in
the same phrase as Ide himself and as the two young women with the hats.
"It's all right, you old darling!" she had said; and her mother sat
alone, trying to fit herself into the new scheme of things which such a
certainty betokened.

Her first distinct feeling was one of irrational resentment. If such a
change was to come, why had it not come sooner? Here was she, a woman
not yet old, who had paid with the best years of her life for the theft
of the happiness that her daughter's contemporaries were taking as
their due. There was no sense, no sequence, in it. She had had what she
wanted, but she had had to pay too much for it. She had had to pay the
last bitterest price of learning that love has a price