h, her
'lame duck,' lived--an aged person, connected with the charring interest;
but after half an hour spent in hearing her habitually lamentable
recital, and dragooning her into temporary comfort, she went on to
Stanhope Gate. The great house was closed and dark.

She had decided to learn something at all costs. It was better to face
the worst, and have it over. And this was her plan: To go first to
Phil's aunt, Mrs. Baynes, and, failing information there, to Irene
herself. She had no clear notion of what she would gain by these visits.

At three o'clock she was in Lowndes Square. With a woman's instinct when
trouble is to be faced, she had put on her best frock, and went to the
battle with a glance as courageous as old Jolyon's itself. Her tremors
had passed into eagerness.

Mrs. Baynes, Bosinney's aunt (Louisa was her name), was in her kitchen
when June was announced, organizing the cook, for she was an excellent
housewife, and, as Baynes always said, there was 'a lot in a good
dinner.' He did his best work after dinner. It was Baynes who built
that remarkably fine row of tall crimson houses in Kensington which
compete with so many others for the title of 'the ugliest in London.'

On hearing June's name, she went hurriedly to her bedroom, and, taking
two large bracelets from a red morocco case in a locked drawer, put them
on her white wrists--for she possessed in a remarkable degree that 'sense
of property,' which, as we know, is the touchstone of Forsyteism, and the
foundation of good morality.

Her figure, of medium height and broad build, with a tendency to
embonpoint, was reflected by the mirror of her whitewood wardrobe, in a
gown made under her own organization, of one of those half-tints,
reminiscent of the distempered walls of corridors in large hotels. She
raised her hands to her hair, which she wore a la Princesse de Galles,
and touched it here and there, settling it more firmly on her head, and
her eyes were full of an unconscious realism, as though she were looking
in the face one of life's sordid facts, and making the best of it. In
youth her cheeks had been of cream and roses, but they were mottled now
by middle-age, and again that hard, ugly directness came into her eyes as
she dabbed a powder-puff across her forehead. Putting the puff down, she
stood quite still before the glass, arranging a smile over her high,
important nose, her, chin, (never large, and now growing smaller with the