r words, rendering futile
such propriety of phrase as she owed to years of association with
educated people. In the same degree did her bearing fall short of that
which distinguishes a lady. The London work-girl is rarely capable of
raising herself or being raised, to a place in life above that to which
she was born; she cannot learn how to stand and sit and move like a
woman bred to refinement, any more than she can fashion her tongue
to graceful speech. Mrs Yule's behaviour to Marian was marked with a
singular diffidence; she looked and spoke affectionately, but not with a
mother's freedom; one might have taken her for a trusted servant waiting
upon her mistress. Whenever opportunity offered, she watched the girl
in a curiously furtive way, that puzzled look on her face becoming very
noticeable. Her consciousness was never able to accept as a familiar and
unimportant fact the vast difference between herself and her daughter.
Marian's superiority in native powers, in delicacy of feeling, in the
results of education, could never be lost sight of. Under ordinary
circumstances she addressed the girl as if tentatively; however sure of
anything from her own point of view, she knew that Marian, as often
as not, had quite a different criterion. She understood that the
girl frequently expressed an opinion by mere reticence, and hence the
carefulness with which, when conversing, she tried to discover the real
effect of her words in Marian's features.

'Hungry, too,' she said, seeing the crust Marian was nibbling. 'You
really must have more lunch, dear. It isn't right to go so long; you'll
make yourself ill.'

'Have you been out?' Marian asked.

'Yes; I went to Holloway.'

Mrs Yule sighed and looked very unhappy. By 'going to Holloway' was
always meant a visit to her own relatives--a married sister with three
children, and a brother who inhabited the same house. To her husband
she scarcely ever ventured to speak of these persons; Yule had
no intercourse with them. But Marian was always willing to listen
sympathetically, and her mother often exhibited a touching gratitude for
this condescension--as she deemed it.

'Are things no better?' the girl inquired.

'Worse, as far as I can see. John has begun his drinking again, and him
and Tom quarrel every night; there's no peace in the 'ouse.'

If ever Mrs Yule lapsed into gross errors of pronunciation or phrase, it
was when she spoke of her kinsfolk. The subject seemed to thro