the peace of your condition. However, as she
never really let Marian see what she was, Marian
might well not have been aware that she herself
saw. Kate was accordingly, to her own vision,
not a hypocrite of virtue, for she gave herself up;
but she was a hypocrite of stupidity, for she kept
to herself everything that was not herself. What
she most kept was the particular sentiment with
which she watched her sister instinctively neglect
nothing that would make for her submission to
their aunt; a state of the spirit that perhaps marked
most sharply how poor you might become when
you minded so much the absence of wealth. It was
through Kate that Aunt Maud should be worked,
and nothing mattered less than what might become
of Kate in the process. Kate was to burn her
ships, in short, so that Marian should profit; and
Marian's desire to profit was quite oblivious of a
dignity that had, after all, its reasons if it had
only cared for them for keeping itself a little stiff.
Kate, to be properly stiff for both of them, would
therefore have had to be selfish, have had to prefer
an ideal of behaviour than which nothing, ever,
was more selfish to the possibility of stray crumbs
for the four small creatures. The tale of Mrs.
Lowder's disgust at her elder niece's marriage to
Mr. Condrip had lost little of its point; the in
credibly fatuous behaviour of Mr. Condrip, the par
son of a dull suburban parish, with a saintly profile
which was always in evidence, being so distinctly on

[[38]]

p037 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p038w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p039

v?