as she liked. She often received such inquiries as if
they reflected in a manner on the pure essence of her little ones. The
four had retired, with much movement and noise, under imperfect control
of the small Irish governess whom their aunt had hunted out for them
and whose brooding resolve not to prolong so uncrowned a martyrdom she
already more than suspected. Their mother had become for Kate--who took
it just for the effect of being their mother--quite a different thing
from the mild Marian of the past: Mr. Condrip's widow expansively
obscured that image. She was little more than a ragged relic, a plain,
prosaic result of him, as if she had somehow been pulled through him as
through an obstinate funnel, only to be left crumpled and useless and
with nothing in her but what he accounted for. She had grown red and
almost fat, which were not happy signs of mourning; less and less like
any Croy, particularly a Croy in trouble, and sensibly like her
husband's two unmarried sisters, who came to see her, in Kate's view,
much too often and stayed too long, with the consequence of inroads
upon the tea and bread-and-butter--matters as to which Kate, not
unconcerned with the tradesmen's books, had feelings. About them,
moreover, Marian _was_ touchy, and her nearer relative, who observed
and weighed things, noted as an oddity that she would have taken any
reflection on them as a reflection on herself. If that was what
marriage necessarily did to you, Kate Croy would have questioned
marriage. It was a grave example, at any rate, of what a man--and such
a man!--might make of a woman. She could see how the Condrip pair
pressed their brother's widow on the subject of Aunt Maud--who wasn't,
after all, _their_ aunt; made her, over their interminable cups,
chatter and even swagger about Lancaster Gate, made her more vulgar
than it had seemed written that any Croy could possibly become on such
a subject. They laid it down, they rubbed it in, that Lancaster Gate
was to be kept in sight, and that she, Kate, was to keep it; so that,
curiously, or at all events sadly, our young woman was sure of being,
in her own person, more permitted to them as an object of comment than
they would in turn ever be permitted to herself. The beauty of which,
too, was that Marian didn't love them. But they were Condrips--they had
grown near the rose; they were almost like Bertie and Maudie, like
Kitty and Guy. They talked of the dead to her, which Kate never d