when one thinks of a good child faithfully adhering to the nursery
ethic the thought is not bearable unless it is understood that there is
a kind nurse in the house who dresses her up for her walk so that people
smile on her in the streets, and maybe buys her a coloured balloon, and
when they come back to tea spreads the jam thick and is not shocked at
the idea of cake. But mother was lying here in a hospital nightgown of
pink flannel, between greyish cotton sheets under horse-blankets, in
pain and about to die; utterly unrewarded. And she had never been
rewarded. Ellen's mind ran through the arcade of their time together and
could find no moment when her mother's life had been decorated by any
bright scrap of that beauty she adored.

Ellen could see her rising in the morning, patting her yawning mouth
with her poor ugly hands, putting her flannel dressing-gown about her,
and treading clumsy with sleep down the creaky stairs to put the kettle
on the gas, on her knees before the kitchen range, her head tied up in a
handkerchief to keep the ash out of her hair, sticking something into
the fire that made disagreeable grating noises which suggested it was
not being used as competently as it might be; standing timidly in shops,
trying to attract the notice of assistants who perceived she was very
poor: but she could never see her visited by beauty. For her it had
stayed in the sunset. It might have abode with her in the form of love:
indeed, Ellen thought that would have been the best form it could have
taken, for she knew that she could be quite happy, even if her life were
harder than her mother's in the one point in which it could be harder
and there were not enough to eat, provided that she had Richard. But she
felt it impossible that her mother could have sipped any real joy from
companionship with herself, whom she conceived as cold and vicious; and
pushing her memory back to the earliest period, where it hated to
linger, she perceived innumerable heartrending intimations that the
free expenditure of her mother's dearness had brought her no comfort of
love.

She could remember no good of her father. It was his habit to wear the
Irish manner of distraction, as he walked the streets with his chin
projected and his eyes focussed in the middle distance to make them look
wild, but his soul was an alert workman who sat tightening screws. By
neat workmanship he could lift from negligences any reproach of
negativeness and tu