quent visits to whom yet continued to be to talk
over everything. One of her reasons for holding
off from the last concession to Aunt Maud was that
she might be the more free to commit herself to
this so much nearer and so much less fortunate
relative, with whom Aunt Maud would have, di
rectly, almost nothing to do. The sharpest pinch
of her state, meanwhile, was exactly that all inter
course with her sister had the effect of casting
down her courage and tying her hands, adding daily
to her sense of the part, not always either uplifting
or sweetening, that the bond of blood might play
in one's life. She was face to face with it now, with
the bond of blood; the consciousness of it was
what she seemed most clearly to have " come into"
by the death of her mother, much of that conscious
ness as her mother had absorbed and carried away.
Her haunting, harrassing father, her menacing, un
compromising aunt, her portionless little nephews
and nieces, were figures that caused the chord of
natural piety superabundantly to vibrate. Her man
ner of putting it to herself but more especially
in respect to Marian was that she saw what you
might be brought to by the cultivation of con
sanguinity. She had taken, in the old days, as she
supposed, the measure of this liability; those being
the days when, as the second-born, she had thought
no one in the world so pretty as Marian, no one
so charming, so clever, so assured, in advance, of
happiness and success. The view was different

[[36]]

p035 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p036w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p037

v?