"For my father, yes."
She had fairly flushed, poor Mrs. Condrip, with horror. "You're
ready----?"
"So I told him. I couldn't tell him less."
"And, pray, could you tell him more?" Marian gasped in her distress.
"What in the world is he _to_ us? You bring out such a thing as that
this way?"
They faced each other--the tears were in Marian's eyes. Kate watched
them there a moment and then said: "I had thought it well over--over
and over. But you needn't feel injured. I'm not going. He won't have
me."
Her companion still panted--it took time to subside. "Well, _I_
wouldn't have you--wouldn't receive you at all, I can assure you--if he
had made you any other answer. I do feel injured--at your having been
willing. If you were to go to papa, my dear, you would have to stop
coming to me." Marian put it thus, indefinably, as a picture of
privation from which her companion might shrink. Such were the threats
she could complacently make, could think herself masterful for making.
"But if he won't take you," she continued, "he shows at least his
sharpness."
Marian had always her views of sharpness; she was, as her sister
privately commented, great on it. But Kate had her refuge from
irritation. "He won't take me," she simply repeated. "But he believes,
like you, in Aunt Maud. He threatens me with his curse if I leave her."
"So you _won't?"_ As the girl at first said nothing her companion
caught at it. "You won't, of course? I see you won't. But I don't see
why, nevertheless, I shouldn't insist to you once for all on the plain
truth of the whole matter. The truth, my dear, of your duty. Do you
ever think about _that?_ It's the greatest duty of all."
"There you are again," Kate laughed. "Papa's also immense on my duty."
"Oh, I don't pretend to be immense, but I pretend to know more than you
do of life; more even perhaps than papa." Marian seemed to see that
personage at this moment, nevertheless, in the light of a kinder irony.
"Poor old papa!"
She sighed it with as many condonations as her sister's ear had more
than once caught in her "Dear old Aunt Maud!" These were things that
made Kate, for the time, turn sharply away, and she gathered herself
now to go. They were the note again of the abject; it was hard to say
which of the persons in question had most shown how little they liked
her. The younger woman proposed, at any rate, to let discussion rest,
and she believed that, for herself, she had done so during the ten
minutes that, thanks to her wish not to break off short, elapsed before
she could gracefully withdraw. It then appeared, however, that Marian
had been discussing still, and there was something that, at the last,
Kate had to take up. "Whom do you mean by Aunt Maud's young man?"
"Whom should I mean but Lord Mark?"
"And where do you pick up such vulgar twaddle?" Kate demanded with her
clear face. "How does such stuff, in this hole, get to you?"
She had no sooner spoken than she asked herself what had become of the
grace to which she had sacrificed. Marian certainly did little to save
it, and nothing indeed was so inconsequent as her ground of complaint.
She desired her to "work" Lancaster Gate as she believed that scene of
abundance could be worked; but she now didn't see why advantage should
be taken of the bloated connection to put an affront on her own poor
home. She appeared in fact for the moment to take the position that
Kate kept her in her "hole" and then heartlessly reflected on her being
in it. Yet she didn't explain how she had picked up the report on which
her sister had challenged her--so that it was thus left to her sister
to see in it, once more, a sign of the creeping curiosity of the Miss
Condrips. They lived in a deeper hole than Marian, but they kept their
ear to the ground, they spent their days in prowling, whereas Marian,
in garments and shoes that seemed steadily to grow looser and larger,
never prowled. There were times when Kate wondered if the Miss Condrips
were offered her by fate as a warning for her own future--to be taken
as showing her what she herself might become at forty if she let things
too recklessly go. What was expected of her by others--and by so many
of them--could, all the same, on occasion, present itself as beyond a
joke; and this was just now the aspect it particularly wore. She was
not only to quarrel with Merton Densher to oblige her five
spectators--with the Miss Condrips there were five; she was to set
forth in pursuit of Lord Mark on some preposterous theory of the
premium attached to success. Mrs. Lowder's hand had attached it, and it
figured at the end of the course as a bell that would ring, break out
into public clamour, as soon as touched. Kate reflected sharply enough
on the weak points of this fond fiction, with the result at last of a
certain chill for her sister's confidence; though Mrs. Condrip still
took refuge in the plea--which was after all the great point--that
their aunt would be munificent when their aunt should be pleased. The
exact identity of her candidate was a detail; what was of the essence
was her conception of the kind of match it was open to her niece to
make with her aid. Marian always spoke of marriages as "matches," but
that was again a detail. Mrs. Lowder's "aid" meanwhile awaited them--if
not to light the way to Lord Mark, then to somebody better. Marian
would put up, in fine, with somebody better; she only wouldn't put up
with somebody so much worse. Kate had, once more, to go through all
this before a graceful issue was reached. It was reached by her paying
with the sacrifice of Mr. Densher for her reduction of Lord Mark to the
absurd. So they separated softly enough. She was to be let off hearing
about Lord Mark so long as she made it good that she wasn't underhand
about anybody else. She had denied everything and every one, she
reflected as she went away--and that was a relief; but it also made
rather a clean sweep of the future. The prospect put on a bareness that
already gave her something in common with the Miss Condrips.