all from her and this time, as it seemed to him,
more than all: the dishonour her father had brought
them, his folly and cruelty and wickedness; the
wounded state of her mother, abandoned, despoiled
and helpless, yet, for the management of such a
home as remained to them, dreadfully unreasonable
too; the extinction of her two young brothers
one, at nineteen, the eldest of the house, by typhoid
fever, contracted at a poisonous little place, as they
had afterwards found out, that they had taken for
a summer; the other, the flower of the flock, a
middy on the Britannia, dreadfully drowned, and
not even by an accident at sea, but by cramp, un-
rescued, while bathing, too late in the autumn, in
a wretched little river during a holiday visit to the
home of a shipmate. Then Marian's unnatural mar
riage, in itself a kind of spiritless turning of the
other cheek to fortune: her actual wretchedness
and plaintiveness, her greasy children, her impos
sible claims, her odious visitors these things com
pleted the proof of the heaviness, for them all, of the
hand of fate. Kate confessedly described them with
an excess of impatience; it was much of her charm
for Densher that she gave in general that turn to
her descriptions, partly as if to amuse him by free
and humorous colour, partly and that charm was
the greatest as if to work off, for her own relief,
her constant perception of the incongruity of things.
She had seen the general show too early and too
sharply, and she was so intelligent that she knew it

[[73]]

p072 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p073w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p074

v?