tures.
Heavens! how the sudden unexpected tomato could annoy me!...

It did much to widen our estrangement that Marion and my aunt failed to
make friends, became, by a sort of instinct, antagonistic.

My aunt, to begin with, called rather frequently, for she was really
anxious to know Marion. At first she would arrive like a whirlwind and
pervade the house with an atmosphere of hello! She dressed already with
that cheerfully extravagant abandon that signalised her accession to
fortune, and dressed her best for these visits.

She wanted to play the mother to me, I fancy, to tell Marion occult
secrets about the way I wore out my boots and how I never could think to
put on thicker things in cold weather. But Marion received her with
that defensive suspiciousness of the shy person, thinking only of the
possible criticism of herself; and my aunt, perceiving this, became
nervous and slangy...

"She says such queer things," said Marion once, discussing her. "But I
suppose it's witty."

"Yes," I said; "it IS witty."

"If I said things like she does--"

The queer things my aunt said were nothing to the queer things she
didn't say. I remember her in our drawing-room one day, and how she
cocked her eye--it's the only expression--at the India-rubber plant in a
Doulton-ware pot which Marion had placed on the corner of the piano.

She was on the very verge of speech. Then suddenly she caught my
expression, and shrank up like a cat that has been discovered looking at
the milk.

Then a wicked impulse took her.

"Didn't say an old word, George," she insisted, looking me full in the
eye.

I smiled. "You're a dear," I said, "not to," as Marion came lowering
into the room to welcome her. But I felt extraordinarily like a
traitor--to the India-rubber plant, I suppose--for all that nothing had
been said...

"Your aunt makes Game of people," was Marion's verdict, and,
open-mindedly: "I suppose it's all right... for her."

Several times we went to the house in Beckenham for lunch, and once or
twice to dinner. My aunt did her peculiar best to be friends, but Marion
was implacable. She was also, I know, intensely uncomfortable, and she
adopted as her social method, an exhausting silence, replying compactly
and without giving openings to anything that was said to her.

The gaps between my aunt's visits grew wider and wider.

My married existence became at last like a narrow deep groove in the
broad expanse of interests in whic