now, but her attitude had been obliged, for many
reasons, to show as the same. The subject of this
estimate was no longer pretty, as the reason for
thinking her clever was no longer plain; yet, be
reaved, disappointed, demoralised, querulous, she
was all the more sharply and insistently Kate's elder
and Kate's own. Kate's most constant feeling
about her was that she would make her, Kate,
do things; and always, in comfortless Chelsea,
at the door of the small house the small rent of
which she couldn't help having on her mind, she
fatalistically asked herself, before going in, which
thing it would probably be this time. She noticed
with profundity that disappointment made people
selfish; she marvelled at the serenity it was the
poor woman's only one of what Marian took for
granted: her own state of abasement as the sec
ond-born, her life reduced to mere inexhaustible
sisterhood. She existed, in that view, wholly for
the small house in Chelsea; the moral of which
moreover, of course, was that the more one gave
oneself the less of one was left. There were always
people to snatch at one, and it would never occur
to them that they were eating one up. They did
that without tasting.

There was no such misfortune, or at any rate
no such discomfort, she further reasoned, as to be
formed at once for being and for seeing. You
always saw, in this case, something else than what
you were, and you got, in consequence, none of

[[37]]

p036 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p037w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p038

v?