II

She had gone to Mrs. Lowder on her mother's death--gone with an effort

the strain and pain of which made her at present, as she recalled them,

reflect on the long way she had travelled since then. There had been

nothing else to do--not a penny in the other house, nothing but unpaid

bills that had gathered thick while its mistress lay mortally ill, and

the admonition that there was nothing she must attempt to raise money

on, since everything belonged to the "estate." How the estate would

turn out at best presented itself as a mystery altogether gruesome; it

had proved, in fact, since then a residuum a trifle less scant than,

with Marian, she had for some weeks feared; but the girl had had at the

beginning rather a wounded sense of its being watched on behalf of

Marian and her children. What on earth was it supposed that _she_

wanted to do to it? She wanted in truth only to give up--to abandon her

own interest, which she, no doubt, would already have done had not the

point been subject to Aunt Maud's sharp intervention. Aunt Maud's

intervention was all sharp now, and the other point, the great one, was

that it was to be, in this light, either all put up with or all

declined. Yet at the winter's end, nevertheless, she could scarce have

said what stand she conceived she had taken. It wouldn't be the first

time she had seen herself obliged to accept with smothered irony other

people's interpretation of her conduct. She often ended by giving up to

them--it seemed really the way to live--the version that met their

convenience.

The tall, rich, heavy house at Lancaster Gate, on the other side of the

Park and the long South Kensington stretches, had figured to her,

through childhood, through girlhood, as the remotest limit of her vague

young world. It was further off and more occasional than anything else

in the comparatively compact circle in which she revolved, and seemed,

by a rigour early marked, to be reached through long, straight,

discouraging vistas, which kept lengthening and straightening, whereas

almost everything else in life was either, at the worst, round about

Cromwell Road, or, at the furthest, in the nearer parts of Kensington

Gardens. Mrs. Lowder was her only "real" aunt, not the wife of an

uncle, and had been thereby, both in ancient days and when the greater

trouble came, the person, of all persons, properly to make some sign;

in accord with which our young woman's feeling was founded on the

impression, quite cherished for years, that the signs made across the

interval just mentioned had never been really in the note of the

situation. The main office of this relative, for the young Croys--apart

from giving them their fixed measure of social greatness--had struck

them as being to form them to a conception of what they were not to

expect. When Kate came to think matters over with the aid of knowledge,

she failed quite to see how Aunt Maud could have been different--she

had rather perceived by this time how many other things might have

been; yet she also made out that if they had all consciously lived

under a liability to the chill breath of _ultima Thule_ they couldn't,

either, on the facts, very well have done less. What in the event

appeared established was that if Mrs. Lowder had disliked them she had

yet not disliked them so much as they supposed. It had at any rate been

for the purpose of showing how she struggled with her aversion that she

sometimes came to see them, that she at regular periods invited them to

her house, and in short, as it now looked, kept them along on the terms

that would best give her sister the perennial luxury of a grievance.

This sister, poor Mrs. Croy, the girl knew, had always judged her

resentfully, and had brought them up, Marian, the boys and herself, to

the idea of a particular attitude, for signs of the practice of which

they watched each other with awe. The attitude was to make plain to

Aunt Maud, with the same regularity as her invitations, that they

sufficed--thanks awfully--to themselves. But the ground of it, Kate

lived to discern, was that this was only because _she_ didn't suffice

to them. The little she offered was to be accepted under protest, yet

not, really, because it was excessive. It wounded them--there was the

rub!--because it fell short.

The number of new things our young lady looked out on from the high

south window that hung over the Park--this number was so great (though

some of the things were only old ones altered and, as the phrase was of

other matters, done up), that life at present turned to her view from

week to week more and more the face of a striking and distinguished

stranger. She had reached a great age--for it quite seemed to her that

at twenty-five it was late to reconsider; and her most general sense

was a shade of regret that she had not known earlier. The world was

different--whether for worse or for better--from her rudimentary

readings, and it gave her the feeling of a wasted past. If she had only

known sooner she might have arranged herself more to meet it. She made,

at all events, discoveries every day, some of which were about herself

and others about other persons. Two of these--one under each head--more

particularly engaged, in alternation, her anxiety. She saw as she had

never seen before how material things spoke to her. She saw, and she

blushed to see, that if, in contrast with some of its old aspects, life

now affected her as a dress successfully "done up," this was exactly by

reason of the trimmings and lace, was a matter of ribbons and silk and

velvet. She had a dire accessibility to pleasure from such sources. She

liked the charming quarters her aunt had assigned her--liked them

literally more than she had in all her other days liked anything; and

nothing could have been more uneasy than her suspicion of her

relative's view of this truth. Her relative was prodigious--she had

never done her relative justice. These larger conditions all tasted of

her, from morning till night; but she was a person in respect to whom

the growth of acquaintance could only--strange as it might seem--keep

your heart in your mouth.

The girl's second great discovery was that, so far from having been for

Mrs. Lowder a subject of superficial consideration, the blighted home

in Lexham Gardens had haunted her nights and her days. Kate had spent,

all winter, hours of observation that were not less pointed for being

spent alone; recent events, which her mourning explained, assured her a

measure of isolation, and it was in the isolation above all that her

neighbour's influence worked. Sitting far downstairs Aunt Maud was yet

a presence from which a sensitive niece could feel herself extremely

under pressure. She knew herself now, the sensitive niece, as having

been marked from far back. She knew more than she could have told you,

by the upstairs fire, in a whole dark December afternoon. She knew so

much that her knowledge was what fairly kept her there, making her at

times more endlessly between the small silk-covered sofa that stood for

her in the firelight and the great grey map of Middlesex spread beneath

her lookout. To go down, to forsake her refuge, was to meet some of her

discoveries half-way, to have to face them or fly before them; whereas

they were at such a height only like the rumble of a far-off siege

heard in the provisioned citadel. She had almost liked, in these weeks,

what had created her suspense and her stress: the loss of her mother,

the submersion of her father, the discomfort of her sister, the

confirmation of their shrunken prospects, the certainty, in especial,

of her having to recognise that, should she behave, as she called it,

decently--that is still do something for others--she would be herself

wholly without supplies. She held that she had a right to sadness and

stillness; she nursed them for their postponing power. What they mainly

postponed was the question of a surrender--though she could not yet

have said exactly of what: a general surrender of everything--that was

at moments the way it presented itself--to Aunt Maud's looming

"personality." It was by her personality that Aunt Maud was prodigious,

and the great mass of it loomed because, in the thick, the foglike air

of her arranged existence, there were parts doubtless magnified and

parts certainly vague. They represented at all events alike, the dim

and the distinct, a strong will and a high hand. It was perfectly

present to Kate that she might be devoured, and she likened herself to

a trembling kid, kept apart a day or two till her turn should come, but

sure sooner or later to be introduced into the cage of the lioness.

The cage was Aunt Maud's own room, her office, her counting-house, her

battlefield, her especial scene, in fine, of action, situated on the

ground-floor, opening from the main hall and figuring rather to our

young woman on exit and entrance as a guard house or a toll-gate. The

lioness waited--the kid had at least that consciousness; was aware of

the neighbourhood of a morsel she had reason to suppose tender. She

would have been meanwhile a wonderful lioness for a show, an

extraordinary figure in a cage or anywhere; majestic, magnificent,

high-coloured, all brilliant gloss, perpetual satin, twinkling bugles

and flashing gems, with a lustre of agate eyes, a sheen of raven hair,

a polish of complexion that was like that of well-kept china and

that--as if the skin were too tight--told especially at curves and

corners. Her niece had a quiet name for her--she kept it quiet;

thinking of her, with a free fancy, as somehow typically insular, she

talked to herself of Britannia of the Market Place--Britannia

unmistakable, but with a pen in her ear, and felt she should not be

happy till she might on some occasion add to the rest of the panoply a

helmet, a shield, a trident and a ledger. It was not in truth, however,

that the forces with which, as Kate felt, she would have to deal were

those most suggested by an image simple and broad; she was learning,

after all, each day, to know her companion, and what she had already

most perceived was the mistake of trusting to easy analogies. There was

a whole side of Britannia, the side of her florid philistinism, her

plumes and her train, her fantastic furniture and heaving bosom, the

false gods of her taste and false notes of her talk, the sole

contemplation of which would be dangerously misleading. She was a

complex and subtle Britannia, as passionate as she was practical, with

a reticule for her prejudices as deep as that other pocket, the pocket

full of coins stamped in her image, that the world best knew her by.

She carried on, in short, behind her aggressive and defensive front,

operations determined by her wisdom. It was in fact, we have hinted, as

a besieger that our young lady, in the provisioned citadel, had for the

present most to think of her, and what made her formidable in this

character was that she was unscrupulous and immoral. So, at all events,

in silent sessions and a youthful off-hand way, Kate conveniently

pictured her: what this sufficiently represented being that her weight

was in the scale of certain dangers--those dangers that, by our

showing, made the younger woman linger and lurk above, while the elder,

below, both militant and diplomatic, covered as much of the ground as

possible. Yet what were the dangers, after all, but just the dangers of

life and of London? Mrs. Lowder _was_ London, _was_ life--the roar of

the siege and the thick of the fray. There were some things, after all,

of which Britannia was afraid; but Aunt Maud was afraid of nothing--not

even, it would appear, of arduous thought. These impressions, none the

less, Kate kept so much to herself that she scarce shared them with

poor Marian, the ostensible purpose of her frequent visits to whom yet

continued to be to talk over everything. One of her reasons for holding

off from the last concession to Aunt Maud was that she might be the

more free to commit herself to this so much nearer and so much less

fortunate relative, with whom Aunt Maud would have, directly, almost

nothing to do. The sharpest pinch of her state, meanwhile, was exactly

that all intercourse with her sister had the effect of casting down her

courage and tying her hands, adding daily to her sense of the part, not

always either uplifting or sweetening, that the bond of blood might

play in one's life. She was face to face with it now, with the bond of

blood; the consciousness of it was what she seemed most clearly to have

"come into" by the death of her mother, much of that consciousness as

her mother had absorbed and carried away. Her haunting, harrassing

father, her menacing, uncompromising aunt, her portionless little

nephews and nieces, were figures that caused the chord of natural piety

superabundantly to vibrate. Her manner of putting it to herself--but

more especially in respect to Marian--was that she saw what you might

be brought to by the cultivation of consanguinity. She had taken, in

the old days, as she supposed, the measure of this liability; those

being the days when, as the second-born, she had thought no one in the

world so pretty as Marian, no one so charming, so clever, so assured,

in advance, of happiness and success. The view was different now, but

her attitude had been obliged, for many reasons, to show as the same.

The subject of this estimate was no longer pretty, as the reason for

thinking her clever was no longer plain; yet, bereaved, disappointed,

demoralised, querulous, she was all the more sharply and insistently

Kate's elder and Kate's own. Kate's most constant feeling about her was

that she would make her, Kate, do things; and always, in comfortless

Chelsea, at the door of the small house the small rent of which she

couldn't help having on her mind, she fatalistically asked herself,

before going in, which thing it would probably be this time. She

noticed with profundity that disappointment made people selfish; she

marvelled at the serenity--it was the poor woman's only one--of what

Marian took for granted: her own state of abasement as the second-born,

her life reduced to mere inexhaustible sisterhood. She existed, in that

view, wholly for the small house in Chelsea; the moral of which

moreover, of course, was that the more one gave oneself the less of one

was left. There were always people to snatch at one, and it would never

occur to _them_ that they were eating one up. They did that without

tasting.

There was no such misfortune, or at any rate no such discomfort, she

further reasoned, as to be formed at once for being and for seeing. You

always saw, in this case, something else than what you were, and you

got, in consequence, none of the peace of your condition. However, as

she never really let Marian see what she was, Marian might well not

have been aware that she herself saw. Kate was accordingly, to her own

vision, not a hypocrite of virtue, for she gave herself up; but she was

a hypocrite of stupidity, for she kept to herself everything that was

not herself. What she most kept was the particular sentiment with which

she watched her sister instinctively neglect nothing that would make

for her submission to their aunt; a state of the spirit that perhaps

marked most sharply how poor you might become when you minded so much

the absence of wealth. It was through Kate that Aunt Maud should be

worked, and nothing mattered less than what might become of Kate in the

process. Kate was to burn her ships, in short, so that Marian should

profit; and Marian's desire to profit was quite oblivious of a dignity

that had, after all, its reasons--if it had only cared for them--for

keeping itself a little stiff. Kate, to be properly stiff for both of

them, would therefore have had to be selfish, have had to prefer an

ideal of behaviour--than which nothing, ever, was more selfish--to the

possibility of stray crumbs for the four small creatures. The tale of

Mrs. Lowder's disgust at her elder niece's marriage to Mr. Condrip had

lost little of its point; the incredibly fatuous behaviour of Mr.

Condrip, the parson of a dull suburban parish, with a saintly profile

which was always in evidence, being so distinctly on record to keep

criticism consistent. He had presented his profile on system, having,

goodness knew, nothing else to present--nothing at all to full-face the

world with, no imagination of the propriety of living and minding his

business. Criticism had remained on Aunt Maud's part consistent enough;

she was not a person to regard such proceedings as less of a mistake

for having acquired more of the privilege of pathos. She had not been

forgiving, and the only approach she made to overlooking them was by

overlooking--with the surviving delinquent--the solid little phalanx

that now represented them. Of the two sinister ceremonies that she

lumped together, the marriage and the interment, she had been present

at the former, just as she had sent Marian, before it, a liberal

cheque; but this had not been for her more than the shadow of an

admitted link with Mrs. Condrip's course. She disapproved of clamorous

children for whom there was no prospect; she disapproved of weeping

widows who couldn't make their errors good; and she had thus put within

Marian's reach one of the few luxuries left when so much else had gone,

an easy pretext for a constant grievance. Kate Croy remembered well

what their mother, in a different quarter, had made of it; and it was

Marian's marked failure to pluck the fruit of resentment that committed

them, as sisters, to an almost equal fellowship in abjection. If the

theory was that, yes, alas, one of the pair had ceased to be noticed,

but that the other was noticed enough to make up for it, who would fail

to see that Kate couldn't separate herself without a cruel pride? That

lesson became sharp for our young lady the day after her interview with

her father.

"I can't imagine," Marian on this occasion said to her, "how you can

think of anything else in the world but the horrid way we're situated."

"And, pray, how do you know," Kate inquired in reply, "anything about

my thoughts? It seems to me I give you sufficient proof of how much I

think of _you._ I don't, really, my dear, know what else you've to do

with!"

Marian's retort, on this, was a stroke as to which she had supplied

herself with several kinds of preparation, but there was, none the

less, something of an unexpected note in its promptitude. She had

foreseen her sister's general fear; but here, ominously, was the

special one. "Well, your own business is of course your own business,

and you may say there's no one less in a position than I to preach to

you. But, all the same, if you wash your hands of me for ever for it, I

won't, for this once, keep back that I don't consider you've a right,

as we all stand, to throw yourself away."

It was after the children's dinner, which was also their mother's, but

which their aunt mostly contrived to keep from ever becoming her own

luncheon; and the two young women were still in the presence of the

crumpled table-cloth, the dispersed pinafores, the scraped dishes, the

lingering odour of boiled food. Kate had asked, with ceremony, if she

might put up a window a little, and Mrs. Condrip had replied without it

that she might do as she liked. She often received such inquiries as if

they reflected in a manner on the pure essence of her little ones. The

four had retired, with much movement and noise, under imperfect control

of the small Irish governess whom their aunt had hunted out for them

and whose brooding resolve not to prolong so uncrowned a martyrdom she

already more than suspected. Their mother had become for Kate--who took

it just for the effect of being their mother--quite a different thing

from the mild Marian of the past: Mr. Condrip's widow expansively

obscured that image. She was little more than a ragged relic, a plain,

prosaic result of him, as if she had somehow been pulled through him as

through an obstinate funnel, only to be left crumpled and useless and

with nothing in her but what he accounted for. She had grown red and

almost fat, which were not happy signs of mourning; less and less like

any Croy, particularly a Croy in trouble, and sensibly like her

husband's two unmarried sisters, who came to see her, in Kate's view,

much too often and stayed too long, with the consequence of inroads

upon the tea and bread-and-butter--matters as to which Kate, not

unconcerned with the tradesmen's books, had feelings. About them,

moreover, Marian _was_ touchy, and her nearer relative, who observed

and weighed things, noted as an oddity that she would have taken any

reflection on them as a reflection on herself. If that was what

marriage necessarily did to you, Kate Croy would have questioned

marriage. It was a grave example, at any rate, of what a man--and such

a man!--might make of a woman. She could see how the Condrip pair

pressed their brother's widow on the subject of Aunt Maud--who wasn't,

after all, _their_ aunt; made her, over their interminable cups,

chatter and even swagger about Lancaster Gate, made her more vulgar

than it had seemed written that any Croy could possibly become on such

a subject. They laid it down, they rubbed it in, that Lancaster Gate

was to be kept in sight, and that she, Kate, was to keep it; so that,

curiously, or at all events sadly, our young woman was sure of being,

in her own person, more permitted to them as an object of comment than

they would in turn ever be permitted to herself. The beauty of which,

too, was that Marian didn't love them. But they were Condrips--they had

grown near the rose; they were almost like Bertie and Maudie, like

Kitty and Guy. They talked of the dead to her, which Kate never did; it

being a relation in which Kate could but mutely listen. She couldn't

indeed too often say to herself that if that was what marriage did to

you----! It may easily be guessed, therefore, that the ironic light of

such reserves fell straight across the field of Marian's warning. "I

don't quite see," she answered, "where, in particular, it strikes you

that my danger lies. I'm not conscious, I assure you, of the least

'disposition' to throw myself anywhere. I feel as if, for the present,

I have been quite sufficiently thrown."

"You don't feel"--Marian brought it all out--"as if you would like to

marry Merton Densher?"

Kate took a moment to meet this inquiry. "Is it your idea that if I

should feel so I would be bound to give you notice, so that you might

step in and head me off? Is that your idea?" the girl asked. Then, as

her sister also had a pause, "I don't know what makes you talk of Mr.

Densher," she observed.

"I talk of him just because you don't. That you never do, in spite of

what I know--that's what makes me think of him. Or rather perhaps it's

what makes me think of _you._ If you don't know by this time what I

hope for you, what I dream of--my attachment being what it is--it's no

use my attempting to tell you." But Marian had in fact warmed to her

work, and Kate was sure she had discussed Mr. Densher with the Miss

Condrips. "If I name that person I suppose it's because I'm so afraid

of him. If you want really to know, he fills me with terror. If you

want really to know, in fact, I dislike him as much as I dread him."

"And yet don't think it dangerous to abuse him to me?"

"Yes," Mrs. Condrip confessed, "I do think it dangerous; but how can I

speak of him otherwise? I dare say, I admit, that I shouldn't speak of

him at all. Only I do want you for once, as I said just now, to know."

"To know what, my dear?"

"That I should regard it," Marian promptly returned, "as far and away

the worst thing that has happened to us yet."

"Do you mean because he hasn't money?"

"Yes, for one thing. And because I don't believe in him."

Kate was civil, but perfunctory. "What do you mean by not believing in

him?"

"Well, being sure he'll never get it. And you _must_ have it. You

_shall_ have it."

"To give it to you?"

Marian met her with a readiness that was practically pert. "To _have_

it, first. Not, at any rate, to go on not having it. Then we should

see."

"We should indeed!" said Kate Croy. It was talk of a kind she loathed,

but if Marian chose to be vulgar what was one to do? It made her think

of the Miss Condrips with renewed aversion. "I like the way you arrange

things--I like what you take for granted. If it's so easy for us to

marry men who want us to scatter gold, I wonder we any of us do

anything else. I don't see so many of them about, nor what interest I

might ever have for them. You live, my dear," she presently added, "in

a world of vain thoughts."

"Not so much as you, Kate; for I see what I see, and you can't turn it

off that way." The elder sister paused long enough for the younger's

face to show, in spite of superiority, an apprehension. "I'm not

talking of any man but Aunt Maud's man, nor of any money, even, if you

like, but Aunt Maud's money. I'm not talking of anything but your doing

what _she_ wants. You're wrong if you speak of anything that I want of

you; I want nothing but what she does. That's good enough for me!"--and

Marian's tone struck her companion as dreadful. "If I don't believe in

Merton Densher, I do at least in Mrs. Lowder."

"Your ideas are the more striking," Kate returned, "that they're the

same as papa's. I had them from him, you may be interested to know--and

with all the brilliancy you may imagine--yesterday."