unctual false remedy I wondered periodically
where he found the energy to return to the attack. He did it every time
with a rage more blanched, but it was clear to me that the tension must
finally snap the cord. We got again and again the irrepressible work of
art, but what did _he_ get, poor man, who wanted something so different?
There were likewise odder questions than this in the matter, phenomena
more curious and mysteries more puzzling, which often for sympathy if
not for illumination I intimately discussed with Mrs. Limbert. She had
her burdens, dear lady: after the removal from London and a considerable
interval she twice again became a mother. Mrs. Stannace too, in a more
restricted sense, exhibited afresh, in relation to the home she had
abandoned, the same exemplary character. In her poverty of guarantees
at Stanhope Gardens there had been least of all, it appeared, a proviso
that she shouldn't resentfully revert again from Goneril to Regan. She
came down to the goose-green like Lear himself, with fewer knights, or
at least baronets, and the joint household was at last patched up. It
fell to pieces and was put together on various occasions before Ray
Limbert died. He was ridden to the end by the superstition that he had
broken up Mrs. Stannace's original home on pretences that had proved
hollow and that if he hadn't given Maud what she might have had he could
at least give her back her mother. I was always sure that a sense of the
compensations he owed was half the motive of the dogged pride with which
he tried to wake up the libraries. I believed Mrs. Stan-nace still had
money, though she pretended that, called upon at every turn to retrieve
deficits, she had long since poured it into the general fund. This
conviction haunted me; I suspected her of secret hoards, and I said to
myself that she couldn't be so infamous as not some day on her deathbed
to leave everything to her less opulent daughter. My compassion for the
Limberts led me to hover perhaps indiscreetly round that closing scene,
to dream of some happy time when such an accession of means would make
up a little for their present penury.

This however was crude comfort, as in the first place I had nothing
definite to go by and in the second I held it for more and more
indicated that Ray wouldn't outlive her. I never ventured to sound him
as to what in this particular he hoped or feared, for after the crisis
marked by his leaving London I had new scrup