his is the one that never will allow a conversation to be at an end.
She turned to Gwen, who was already opening a letter to read, to
say:--"You used the expressions 'reconsidering' and 'jilting' just now,
my dear, as if they were synonymous. I think you were forgetting that it
is impossible to 'jilt'--if I understand that term rightly--any man
until after you have become formally engaged to him, and therefore....
However, if your letter is so very important, I can go. We can talk
another time." This rather stiffly, Gwen having opened the letter, and
been caught and held, apparently, by something in a legible handwriting.
Whatever it was, Gwen put it down with reluctance, that she might show
her sense of the importance of her mother's departure, whom she kissed
and olive-branched, beyond what she accounted her lawful claims, in
order to wind her up. She went with her as far as the landing, where
cramped stairs ended and gradients became indulgent, and then got back
as fast as she could to the reading of that letter.

It _was_ an important letter, there could be no doubt of that, as a
thick one from Irene--practically from Adrian--lay unopened on the table
while she read through something on many pages that made her face go
paler at each new paragraph. On its late envelope, lying opened by
Irene's, was the postmark "Chorlton-under-Bradbury." But it was in a
handwriting Gwen was unfamiliar with. It was _not_ old Mrs. Picture's,
which she knew quite well. For which reasons the thought had crossed her
mind, when she first saw the envelope, that the old lady was seriously
ill--perhaps suddenly dead. It was so very possible. Think of those
delicate transparent hands, that frame whose old tenant had outstayed so
many a notice to quit. Gwen's cousin, Percy Pellew, had said to her when
he carried it upstairs in Cavendish Square, that it weighed absolutely
nothing.

But this letter said nothing of death, nor of illness with danger of
death. And yet Gwen was so disturbed by it that there was scarcely a
brilliant visitor to her mother's that afternoon but said to some other
brilliant visitor:--"What can be the matter with Gwen? She's not
herself!" And then each corrected the other's false impression that it
was the dangerous condition of her most intimate cousin and friend, Miss
Clotilda Grahame; or screws loose and jammed bearings in the machinery
of her love-affair, already the property of Rumour. And as each
brilliant visitor w