ecially at curves and
corners. Her niece had a quiet name for her--she kept it quiet;
thinking of her, with a free fancy, as somehow typically insular, she
talked to herself of Britannia of the Market Place--Britannia
unmistakable, but with a pen in her ear, and felt she should not be
happy till she might on some occasion add to the rest of the panoply a
helmet, a shield, a trident and a ledger. It was not in truth, however,
that the forces with which, as Kate felt, she would have to deal were
those most suggested by an image simple and broad; she was learning,
after all, each day, to know her companion, and what she had already
most perceived was the mistake of trusting to easy analogies. There was
a whole side of Britannia, the side of her florid philistinism, her
plumes and her train, her fantastic furniture and heaving bosom, the
false gods of her taste and false notes of her talk, the sole
contemplation of which would be dangerously misleading. She was a
complex and subtle Britannia, as passionate as she was practical, with
a reticule for her prejudices as deep as that other pocket, the pocket
full of coins stamped in her image, that the world best knew her by.
She carried on, in short, behind her aggressive and defensive front,
operations determined by her wisdom. It was in fact, we have hinted, as
a besieger that our young lady, in the provisioned citadel, had for the
present most to think of her, and what made her formidable in this
character was that she was unscrupulous and immoral. So, at all events,
in silent sessions and a youthful off-hand way, Kate conveniently
pictured her: what this sufficiently represented being that her weight
was in the scale of certain dangers--those dangers that, by our
showing, made the younger woman linger and lurk above, while the elder,
below, both militant and diplomatic, covered as much of the ground as
possible. Yet what were the dangers, after all, but just the dangers of
life and of London? Mrs. Lowder _was_ London, _was_ life--the roar of
the siege and the thick of the fray. There were some things, after all,
of which Britannia was afraid; but Aunt Maud was afraid of nothing--not
even, it would appear, of arduous thought. These impressions, none the
less, Kate kept so much to herself that she scarce shared them with
poor Marian, the ostensible purpose of her frequent visits to whom yet
continued to be to talk over everything. One of her reasons for holding
off from the las