o them--how vain her appeal
remained. "I've never pretended to do more than my duty; I've given you
the best and the clearest advice." And then came up the spring that
moved him. "If it only displeases you, you can go to Marian to be
consoled." What he couldn't forgive was her dividing with Marian her
scant share of the provision their mother had been able to leave them.
She should have divided it with _him._

II

She had gone to Mrs. Lowder on her mother's death--gone with an effort
the strain and pain of which made her at present, as she recalled them,
reflect on the long way she had travelled since then. There had been
nothing else to do--not a penny in the other house, nothing but unpaid
bills that had gathered thick while its mistress lay mortally ill, and
the admonition that there was nothing she must attempt to raise money
on, since everything belonged to the "estate." How the estate would
turn out at best presented itself as a mystery altogether gruesome; it
had proved, in fact, since then a residuum a trifle less scant than,
with Marian, she had for some weeks feared; but the girl had had at the
beginning rather a wounded sense of its being watched on behalf of
Marian and her children. What on earth was it supposed that _she_
wanted to do to it? She wanted in truth only to give up--to abandon her
own interest, which she, no doubt, would already have done had not the
point been subject to Aunt Maud's sharp intervention. Aunt Maud's
intervention was all sharp now, and the other point, the great one, was
that it was to be, in this light, either all put up with or all
declined. Yet at the winter's end, nevertheless, she could scarce have
said what stand she conceived she had taken. It wouldn't be the first
time she had seen herself obliged to accept with smothered irony other
people's interpretation of her conduct. She often ended by giving up to
them--it seemed really the way to live--the version that met their
convenience.

The tall, rich, heavy house at Lancaster Gate, on the other side of the
Park and the long South Kensington stretches, had figured to her,
through childhood, through girlhood, as the remotest limit of her vague
young world. It was further off and more occasional than anything else
in the comparatively compact circle in which she revolved, and seemed,
by a rigour early marked, to be reached through long, straight,
discouraging vistas, which kept lengthening and straightening, whereas
almos