rly. Her whole life
went on velvet, rolling smoothly along, without jar or interruption,
blameless, pleasant, kind. People talked of her old age as a model of old
age, with no bitterness or sourness in it. And, indeed, why should she
have been sour or bitter? It suited her far better to be kind. She was in
reality kind to everybody, liking to see pleasant faces about her. The
poor had no reason to complain of her; her servants were very
comfortable; and the one person in her house who was nearer to her own
level, who was her companion and most important minister, was very
comfortable too. This was a young woman about twenty, a very distant
relation, with "no claim," everybody said, upon her kind mistress and
friend,--the daughter of a distant cousin. How very few think anything
at all of such a tie! but Lady Mary had taken her young namesake when she
was a child, and she had grown up as it were at her godmother's
footstool, in the conviction that the measured existence of the old was
the rule of life, and that her own trifling personality counted for
nothing, or next to nothing, in its steady progress. Her name was Mary
too--always called "little Mary" as having once been little, and not yet
very much in the matter of size. She was one of the pleasantest things
to look at of all the pretty things in Lady Mary's rooms, and she had the
most sheltered, peaceful, and pleasant life that could be conceived. The
only little thorn in her pillow was, that whereas in the novels, of which
she read a great many, the heroines all go and pay visits and have
adventures, she had none, but lived constantly at home. There was
something much more serious in her life, had she known, which was that
she had nothing, and no power of doing anything for herself; that she had
all her life been accustomed to a modest luxury which would make poverty
very hard to her; and that Lady Mary was over eighty, and had made no
will. If she did not make any will, her property would all go to her
grandson, who was so rich already that her fortune would be but as a drop
in the ocean to him; or to some great-grandchildren of whom she knew very
little,--the descendants of a daughter long ago dead who had married an
Austrian, and who were therefore foreigners both in birth and name. That
she should provide for little Mary was therefore a thing which nature
demanded, and which would hurt nobody. She had said so often; but she
deferred the doing of it as a thin