y impossible sister. And as to the notion that Mrs. Sarratt
might become at some distant period her brother's wife, Lady Farrell of
Carton, Cicely would have received it with scorn, and fought the
realisation of it tooth and nail. Yet now all the 'Farrell feeling,' the
Farrell pride, in this one instance, at any rate, was gone. Why? Cicely
didn't know. She supposed first because Nelly was such a dear creature,
and next because the war had made such a curious difference in things.
The old lines were being rubbed out. And Cicely, who had been in her day
as exclusively snobbish as any other well-born damsel, felt now that it
would not matter in the least if they remained rubbed out. Persons who
'did things' by land or sea; persons who invented things; persons with
ideas; persons who had the art of making others follow them into the
jaws of death;--these were going to be the aristocracy of the future.
Though the much abused aristocracy of the present hadn't done badly
either!

So she was only concerned with the emotional aspects of her brother's
state. Was Nelly now convinced of her husband's death?--was that what
her black meant? And if she were convinced, and it were legally possible
for her to marry again and all that--what chance would there be for
Willy? Cicely was much puzzled by Nelly's relation to him. She had seen
many signs, pathetic signs, of a struggle on Nelly's side against
Farrell's influence; especially in the time immediately following her
first return to the north in March. She had done her best then, it
seemed to Cicely, to do without him and to turn to other interests and
occupations than those he set her, and she had failed; partly no doubt
owing to her physical weakness, which had put an end to many
projects,--that of doing week-end munition work for instance--but still
more, surely, to Farrell's own qualities. 'He is such a charmer with
women,' thought Cicely, half smiling; 'that's what it is.'

By which she meant that he had the very rare gift of tenderness; of
being able to make a woman feel, that as a human being, quite apart from
any question of passion, she interested and touched him. It was just
sympathy, she supposed, the artistic magnetic quality in him, which made
him so attractive to women, and women so attractive to him. He was no
longer a young man in the strict sense; he was a man of forty, with the
prestige of great accomplishment, and a wide knowledge of life. It was
generally supposed