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 con
firmation 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 post
poned 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 mag
nified 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,

[[33]]

p032 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p033w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p034

v?