such proceedings as less of a mistake for having acquired more of the privilege of pathos. She hadn’t 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 enquired 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 in consequence, 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 enquiries 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 up 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 reflexion on them as a reflexion on herself. If that was what marriage necessarily did to you Kate Croy would have questioned marriage. It was at any rate a grave example 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 that for the present I’ve been quite sufficiently thrown.”
“You don’t feel” — Marian brought it all out— “that you’d like to marry Merton Densher?”
Kate took a moment to meet this enquiry. “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 mechanical. “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
