her nearer relative, who observed and weighed
things, noted as an oddity that she would have
taken any reflection on them as a reflection on her
self. If that was what marriage necessarily did to
you, Kate Croy would have questioned marriage.
It was a grave example, at any rate, of what a man
and such a man! might make of a woman. She
could see how the Condrip pair pressed their
brother's widow on the subject of Aunt Maud
who wasn t, after all, their aunt; made her, over
their interminable cups, chatter and even swagger
about Lancaster Gate, made her more vulgar than
it had seemed written that any Croy could possibly
become on such a subject. They laid it down, they
rubbed it in, that Lancaster Gate was to be kept
in sight, and that she, Kate, was to keep it; so
that, curiously, or at all events sadly, our young
woman was sure of being, in her own person, more
permitted to them as an object of comment than
they would in turn ever be permitted to herself.
The beauty of which, too, was that Marian didn't
love them. But they were Condrips they had
grown near the rose; they were almost like Bertie
and Maudie, like Kitty and Guy. They talked of
the dead to her, which Kate never did; it being a
relation in which Kate could but mutely listen. She
couldn't indeed too often say to herself that if that
was what marriage did to you! It may easily
be guessed, therefore, that the ironic light of such
reserves fell straight across the field of Marian's

[[42]]

p041 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p042w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p043

v?