“Then he must be an ass! And how in the world can you consider it to improve him for me,” her father pursued, “that he’s also destitute and impossible? There are asses and asses, even—the right and the wrong—and you appear to have carefully picked out one of the wrong. Your aunt knows them, by good fortune; I perfectly trust, as I tell you, her judgment for them; and you may take it from me once for all that I won’t hear of anyone of whom she won’t.” Which led up to his last word. “If you should really defy us both—!”
“Well, papa?”
“Well, my sweet child, I think that—reduced to insignificance as you may fondly believe me—I should still not be quite without some way of making you regret it.”
She had a pause, a grave one, but not, as appeared, that she might measure this danger. “If I shouldn’t do it, you know, it wouldn’t be because I’m afraid of you.”
“Oh, if you don’t do it,” he retorted, “you may be as bold as you like!”
“Then you can do nothing at all for me?”
He showed her, this time unmistakably—it was before her there on the landing, at the top of the tortuous stairs and in the midst of the strange smell that seemed to cling to them—how vain her appeal remained. “I’ve never pretended to do more than my duty; I’ve given you the best and the clearest advice.” And then came up the spring that moved him. “If it only displeases you, you can go to Marian to be consoled.” What he couldn’t forgive was her dividing with Marian her scant share of the provision their mother had been able to leave them. She should have divided it with him.
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
