t everything else in life was either, at the worst, round about
Cromwell Road, or, at the furthest, in the nearer parts of Kensington
Gardens. Mrs. Lowder was her only "real" aunt, not the wife of an
uncle, and had been thereby, both in ancient days and when the greater
trouble came, the person, of all persons, properly to make some sign;
in accord with which our young woman's feeling was founded on the
impression, quite cherished for years, that the signs made across the
interval just mentioned had never been really in the note of the
situation. The main office of this relative, for the young Croys--apart
from giving them their fixed measure of social greatness--had struck
them as being to form them to a conception of what they were not to
expect. When Kate came to think matters over with the aid of knowledge,
she failed quite to see how Aunt Maud could have been different--she
had rather perceived by this time how many other things might have
been; yet she also made out that if they had all consciously lived
under a liability to the chill breath of _ultima Thule_ they couldn't,
either, on the facts, very well have done less. What in the event
appeared established was that if Mrs. Lowder had disliked them she had
yet not disliked them so much as they supposed. It had at any rate been
for the purpose of showing how she struggled with her aversion that she
sometimes came to see them, that she at regular periods invited them to
her house, and in short, as it now looked, kept them along on the terms
that would best give her sister the perennial luxury of a grievance.
This sister, poor Mrs. Croy, the girl knew, had always judged her
resentfully, and had brought them up, Marian, the boys and herself, to
the idea of a particular attitude, for signs of the practice of which
they watched each other with awe. The attitude was to make plain to
Aunt Maud, with the same regularity as her invitations, that they
sufficed--thanks awfully--to themselves. But the ground of it, Kate
lived to discern, was that this was only because _she_ didn't suffice
to them. The little she offered was to be accepted under protest, yet
not, really, because it was excessive. It wounded them--there was the
rub!--because it fell short.

The number of new things our young lady looked out on from the high
south window that hung over the Park--this number was so great (though
some of the things were only old ones altered and, as the phrase was of
other matter