ne."

"You must be intellectual then. Now mother was different. No one could
have called her an intellectual, though she could always take a point
if you put it to her. Do you know, you're not like an elderly pairson at
all. Usually one thinks of a lady of your age as just a buddy in a
bonnet. But you've got such an active mind, not like a young pairson's.
I'll take Froude's 'Life of Jane Welsh Carlyle.' That ought to do."

"I shouldn't take it if I were you. It's too interesting. It'll keep you
awake."

"Oh, I'll not sleep in any case. I feel awful wakeful. But it'll be all
right as soon as Richard comes."

Her tone, betraying so unreproachfully that she quite expected that till
then things would be all wrong, reminded Marion what evenings of aborted
intimacies and passages of slow liking truncated by moments of swift
dislike, had passed in this room whose appearance she had been watching
with such satisfaction. She reflected on the inertia which inanimate
matter preserves towards the fret that animate creatures conduct in its
midst, the refusal of the world to grow grey at anybody's breath.
Exhibited by nature in the benedictions of sunlight that fall through
the court windows on the criminal in the dock, or the rain that falls on
the flags and Venetian masts of the civic festival, it has an air of
irony. But there is obstinacy about the way a chair keeps its high
polish though its sitter cries her eyes red.... With alarm she perceived
that she was showing a disposition to flee from a difficult situation
into irrelevant thought, which she had always regarded as one of the
most contemptible of male characteristics. She checked herself sharply.
It was necessary that she should use the remaining moments of the
evening in making Ellen like her.

"I think I'll wish you good-night, Mrs. Yaverland," said the girl.

"Let me come and see if you've got all you want."

But there was nothing Ellen wanted. She passed into the room of bright
new things and sat down on her bed and expressed complete satisfaction
in dogged tones. "Indeed, that gas-fire's sheer luxury," she said, "for
I'm strong as a horse. Really, I've everything, thank you...."

"Let me brush your hair."

As she took out the coarse black pins, her heart rejoiced because
Richard would have all this beautiful hair to play with; yet as she
brushed it out she wished that his thirst for beauty could have been
gratified by some inorganic gorgeousness, some strip