ws. From a combination of
kindness, weakness, and letting things slide, they made no complaints.
Mr. Symons always remembered and felt sorry for the episode which
Henrietta herself had almost forgotten, and he was determined to make up
to her by letting her be as unpleasant as she liked at home.

If only they had spoken strongly while there was yet time. They did not
realize, it is difficult for those in the same house to realize, where
things were tending. Henrietta's temper became less violent; there are
fewer occasions for losing a temper when one is grown up, but she took
to nagging like a duck to water.

But if they made no complaints, the men left her to herself. Mr. Symons
spent many hours at his club, and her brothers entertained their friends
in the smoking-room. She was vaguely disappointed; she had an idea,
gleaned from novels and magazines, that as the home daughter to a
widowed father, the home sister to two brothers, she would be consulted,
leant on, confided in. Mr. Symons missed his wife at every turn, but he
never felt Henrietta could take her place. Her nagging shut up his heart
against her. He thought it silly, rather unfairly, perhaps, for she
inherited the habit from her mother, and he had never thought _her_
nagging silly.

As to William and Harold, they had come to the ages of thirty-five and
twenty-six without any wish for confidence, and why should they wish to
confide in Henrietta? She was not wise and she was not sympathetic. The
mere fact that they lived in the same house with her caused no automatic
opening of the heart. Well on in middle life, William became engaged,
and suddenly poured out everything to his love, but for the present he
and Harold were content to go through life never saying anything about
themselves to anybody. In fact, they hardly ever thought of Henrietta.
She would have been astonished if she had known what an infinitesimal
difference she made in their lives.

As mistress of the house, Henrietta was promoted to the circle of the
married ladies, and the happiest hours of her life were spent in visits
she and they interchanged, when they talked about servants,
arrangements, prices, and health.

They were not intimate friends. Perhaps the women of fifty years ago did
not have the faculty of staunch and close friend-making possessed by
our generation. And now Henrietta did not very much want to make
friends. She would have thought intimacy a little schoolgirlish, a
li