she was
a weak, inconsequent, spasmodic young person, with a standard not
really, or at any rate not continuously, high; and I have no desire that
she shall appear anything but what she was. It must even be related of
her that since she could not escape and live in lodgings and paint fans
(there were reasons why this combination was impossible) she determined
to try and be happy in the given circumstances--to float in shallow,
turbid water. She gave up the attempt to understand the cynical _modus
vivendi_ at which her companions seemed to have arrived; she knew it was
not final but it served them sufficiently for the time; and if it served
them why should it not serve her, the dependent, impecunious, tolerated
little sister, representative of the class whom it behoved above all to
mind their own business? The time was coming round when they would all
move up to town, and there, in the crowd, with the added movement, the
strain would be less and indifference easier.

Whatever Lionel had said to his wife that evening she had found
something to say to him: that Laura could see, though not so much from
any change in the simple expression of his little red face and in the
vain bustle of his existence as from the grand manner in which Selina
now carried herself. She was 'smarter' than ever and her waist was
smaller and her back straighter and the fall of her shoulders finer; her
long eyes were more oddly charming and the extreme detachment of her
elbows from her sides conduced still more to the exhibition of her
beautiful arms. So she floated, with a serenity not disturbed by a
general tardiness, through the interminable succession of her
engagements. Her photographs were not to be purchased in the Burlington
Arcade--she had kept out of that; but she looked more than ever as they
would have represented her if they had been obtainable there. There were
times when Laura thought her brother-in-law's formless desistence too
frivolous for nature: it even gave her a sense of deeper dangers. It was
as if he had been digging away in the dark and they would all tumble
into the hole. It happened to her to ask herself whether the things he
had said to her the afternoon he fell upon her in the schoolroom had not
all been a clumsy practical joke, a crude desire to scare, that of a
schoolboy playing with a sheet in the dark; or else brandy and soda,
which came to the same thing. However this might be she was obliged to
recognise that the