t concession to Aunt Maud was that she might be the
more free to commit herself to this so much nearer and so much less
fortunate relative, with whom Aunt Maud would have, directly, almost
nothing to do. The sharpest pinch of her state, meanwhile, was exactly
that all intercourse with her sister had the effect of casting down her
courage and tying her hands, adding daily to her sense of the part, not
always either uplifting or sweetening, that the bond of blood might
play in one's life. She was face to face with it now, with the bond of
blood; the consciousness of it was what she seemed most clearly to have
"come into" by the death of her mother, much of that consciousness as
her mother had absorbed and carried away. Her haunting, harrassing
father, her menacing, uncompromising aunt, her portionless little
nephews and nieces, were figures that caused the chord of natural piety
superabundantly to vibrate. Her manner of putting it to herself--but
more especially in respect to Marian--was that she saw what you might
be brought to by the cultivation of consanguinity. She had taken, in
the old days, as she supposed, the measure of this liability; those
being the days when, as the second-born, she had thought no one in the
world so pretty as Marian, no one so charming, so clever, so assured,
in advance, of happiness and success. The view was different now, but
her attitude had been obliged, for many reasons, to show as the same.
The subject of this estimate was no longer pretty, as the reason for
thinking her clever was no longer plain; yet, bereaved, disappointed,
demoralised, querulous, she was all the more sharply and insistently
Kate's elder and Kate's own. Kate's most constant feeling about her was
that she would make her, Kate, do things; and always, in comfortless
Chelsea, at the door of the small house the small rent of which she
couldn't help having on her mind, she fatalistically asked herself,
before going in, which thing it would probably be this time. She
noticed with profundity that disappointment made people selfish; she
marvelled at the serenity--it was the poor woman's only one--of what
Marian took for granted: her own state of abasement as the second-born,
her life reduced to mere inexhaustible sisterhood. She existed, in that
view, wholly for the small house in Chelsea; the moral of which
moreover, of course, was that the more one gave oneself the less of one
was left. There were always people to snatch at on