ce to
flatness. "You know what Percival is and the comfort I have of him. You
know the property and what he's doing with it and what comfort I get
from _that_! Everything's dreary but what you can do for us.
Everything's odious, down to living in a hole with one's girls who don't
marry. Grace is impossible--I don't know what's the matter with her; no
one will look at her, and she's so conceited with it--sometimes I feel
as if I could beat her! And Biddy will never marry, and we're three
dismal women in a filthy house, and what are three dismal women, more or
less, in London?"

So with an unexpected rage of self-exposure she poured out her
disappointments and troubles, tore away the veil from her sadness and
soreness. It almost scared him to see how she hated her life, though at
another time it might have been amusing to note how she despised her
gardenless house. Of course it wasn't a country-house, and she couldn't
get used to that. Better than he could do--for it was the sort of thing
into which in any case a woman enters more than a man--she felt what a
lift into brighter air, what a regilding of his sisters' possibilities,
his marriage to Julia would effect for them. He couldn't trace the
difference, but his mother saw it all as a shining picture. She hung the
bright vision before him now--she stood there like a poor woman crying
for a kindness. What was filial in him, all the piety he owed,
especially to the revived spirit of his father, more than ever present
on a day of such public pledges, became from one moment to the other as
the very handle to the door of the chamber of concessions. He had the
impulse, so embarrassing when it is a question of consistent action, to
see in a touching, an interesting light any forcibly presented side of
the life of another: such things effected a union with something in
_his_ life, and in the recognition of them was no soreness of sacrifice
and no consciousness of merit.

Rapidly, at present, this change of scene took place before his
spiritual eye. He found himself believing, because his mother
communicated the belief, that it depended but on his own conduct richly
to alter the social outlook of the three women who clung to him and who
declared themselves forlorn. This was not the highest kind of motive,
but it contained a spring, it touched into life again old injunctions
and appeals. Julia's wide kingdom opened out round him and seemed
somehow to wear the face of his own po