stana 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 Ken
sington stretches, had figured to her, through child
hood, 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 's feeling was founded on the im
pression, 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 great
ness had struck them as being to form them to a

[[29]]

p028 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p029w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p030

v?