a. It would make me more possible to my pseudo-sister. It would be,
as it were, a starting-point, would make me potentially a somebody of
her sort of ideal. Moreover, I should be under the same roof, near her,
with her sometimes. One asks so little more than that, that it seemed
almost half the battle. I began to consider phrases of thanks and
acceptance and then uttered them.

I never quite understood the bearings of that scene; never quite whether
my aunt really knew that my sister was not my sister. She was a
wonderfully clever woman of the unscrupulous order, with a _sang-froid_
and self-possession well calculated to let her cut short any
inconvenient revelations. It was as if she had had long practice in the
art, though I cannot say what occasion she can have had for its
practice--perhaps for the confounding of wavering avowers of Dissent at
home.

I used to think that she knew, if not all, at least a portion; that the
weight that undoubtedly was upon her mind was nothing else but that. She
broke up, was breaking up from day to day, and I can think of no other
reason. She had the air of being disintegrated, like a mineral under an
immense weight--quartz in a crushing mill; of being dulled and numbed as
if she were under the influence of narcotics.

There is little enough wonder, if she actually carried that imponderable
secret about with her. I used to look at her sometimes, and wonder if
she, too, saw the oncoming of the inevitable. She was limited enough in
her ideas, but not too stupid to take that in if it presented itself.
Indeed they have that sort of idea rather grimly before them all the
time--that class.

It must have been that that was daily, and little by little, pressing
down her eyelids and deepening the quivering lines of her impenetrable
face. She had a certain solitary grandeur, the pathos attaching to the
last of a race, of a type; the air of waiting for the deluge, of
listening for an inevitable sound--the sound of oncoming waters.

It was weird, the time that I spent in that house--more than
weird--deadening. It had an extraordinary effect on me--an effect that
my "sister," perhaps, had carefully calculated. She made pretensions of
that sort later on; said that she had been breaking me in to perform my
allotted task in the bringing on of the inevitable.

I have nowhere come across such an intense solitude as there was there,
a solitude that threw one so absolutely upon one's self and into o