uest which so troubled the curious.
She was a brilliant and an attractive woman, sparkling as a diamond, and
apparently as hard. That she loved Horace there was no doubt, and he had
adored her. Yet he could not influence her as most only sons can
influence their mothers. She was liberally gifted with powers of
resistance, and in all directions opposed impenetrable barriers to the
mental or spiritual assaults of those with whom she came in contact. It
seemed impossible for Mrs. Errington to receive, like a waxen tablet, a
definite impression. She was so completely herself that she walked the
world as one clad in armour which turned aside all weapons. This might
have been partly the reason why men found her so attractive, partly,
also, the reason why Horace considered her, even while he was not yet
acquainted with trousers, as so very wonderful among women.

Among many indifferences, Mrs. Errington included a definite
indifference to the sufferings of those less fortunate than herself.
Legacies came to her as often as mendicants to Victor Hugo's Bishop of
D----. She received them with a quiet greediness so prettily concealed
at first that nobody called it vulgar. As time went on this greediness
grew to gluttony. Mrs. Errington began to feel that fatal influence
which came upon the man who built walls with his gold, and each day
longed to see the walls rise higher round him. A passion for mere
possession seized her and dominated her. Even, she permitted the world,
always curiously nosing, like a dog, in people's gutters, to become
aware of this passion. This beautifully dressed, gay and clever woman
was known to be an eager miser by her acquaintance first, and last by
her own son Horace. It is true that she spent money on the so-called
"good things" of life, gave admirable dinners, and would as soon have
gone without clothes as without her opera-box. But she practised an
intense economy in many secret and some public ways, and, more
especially, she was completely deaf to those appeals of suffering, and
sometimes of charlatanry, which besiege our ears in London, so full of
wily outcasts and of those who are terribly in need. Mrs. Errington's
name figured in no charitable lists. She seldom even gave her patronage
to a bazaar, and, above all things, she positively abhorred the beggars
who make the streets and parks their hunting-grounds, who hover before
doorsteps, and grow up from the ground, like mustard-seeds, when a
lugga