opening from the main hall and figuring rather to
our young woman on exit and entrance as a guard
house or a toll-gate. The lioness waited the kid
had at least that consciousness; was aware of the
neighbourhood of a morsel she had reason to sup
pose tender. She would have been meanwhile a
wonderful lioness for a show, an extraordinary fig
ure in a cage or anywhere; majestic, magnificent,
high-coloured, all brilliant gloss, perpetual satin,
twinkling bugles and flashing gems, with a lustre
of agate eyes, a sheen of raven hair, a polish of
complexion that was like that of well-kept china
and that as if the skin were too tight told espe
cially at curves and corners. Her niece had a quiet
name for her she kept it quiet; thinking of her,
with a free fancy, as somehow typically insular, she
talked to herself of Britannia of the Market Place
Britannia unmistakable, but with a pen in her
ear, and felt she should not be happy till she might
on some occasion add to the rest of the panoply
a helmet, a shield, a trident and a ledger. It was
not in truth, however, that the forces with which,
as Kate felt, she would have to deal were those
most suggested by an image simple and broad; she
was learning, after all, each day, to know her com
panion, and what she had already most perceived
was the mistake of trusting to easy analogies.
There was a whole side of Britannia, the side of
her florid philistinism, her plumes and her train,
her fantastic furniture and heaving bosom, the false

[[34]]

p033 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p034w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p035

v?