had shortly been visited with a distressing hiccup, which shook his
waistcoat so violently that the little cross was sent flying up into the
air. "Mother will laugh when I tell her about that," she said to
herself, and did not remember for a second that her mother had been dead
six weeks.

This sharp reminder of the way they had conspired together to cover the
blank wall of daily life with a trellis of trivial laughter made her
stare under knitted brows at the companionship that was to be hers
henceforward. It could not be as good as that. Indeed, from such slender
intimations as she had received, it was not going to be good at all. Her
inflexibly honest aesthetic sense had made her lay by Mrs. Yaverland's
letters with the few trinkets and papers she desired to keep for ever,
because they were written in such an exquisite script, each black word
written so finely and placed so fastidiously on the thick, rough, white
paper, and she felt it a duty to do honour to all lovely things. But
their contents had increased her sense of bereavement. They had come
like a north wind blowing into a room that is already cold. She had not
wished to find them so, for she disliked becoming so nearly the subject
of a comic song as a woman who hates her mother-in-law. But it was
really the fact that they had the air of letters written by someone who
was sceptical of the very existence of the addressee and had sent them
merely to humour some third person. And where the expressions were
strong she felt that they were qualified by their own terseness. Old
people, she felt, ought to write fluently kind things in a running
Italian hand. She was annoyed too by the way Richard always spoke of her
as Marion. Even the anecdotes he recounted to show how brave and wise
his mother was left Ellen a little tight-lipped. He said she was in
favour of Woman's Suffrage, but it was almost as bad as being against it
to have such gifts and never to have done anything with them, and to
have been economically independent all the days of her life.

It became evident from the way that a kind of heated physical
ill-breeding seemed to fall on everybody in the carriage, and the way
they began to lurch against each other and pull packages off the rack
and from under the seat with disregard for each other's comfort, that
they were approaching the end of the journey; and she began to think of
Marion with terror and vindictiveness, and this abstinence from a career
becam