reflection, a trifle more conscious. Something de
terminant, when the girl had left her, took place in
her nameless but, as soon as she had given way,
coercive. It was as if she knew again, in this ful
ness of time, that she had been, after Maud's mar
riage, just sensibly outlived or, as people nowadays
said, shunted. Mrs. Lowder had left her behind,
and on the occasion, subsequently, of the corre
sponding date in her own life not the second, the
sad one, with its dignity of sadness, but the first,
with the meagreness of its supposed felicity she
had been, in the same spirit, almost patronisingly
pitied. If that suspicion, even when it had ceased
to matter, had never quite died out for her, there
was doubtless some oddity in its now offering itself
as a link, rather than as another break, in the chain;
and indeed there might well have been for her a
mood in which the notion of the development of
patronage in her quondam schoolmate would have
settled her question in another sense. It was actu
ally settled if the case be worth our analysis by
the happy consummation, the poetic justice, the
generous revenge, of her having at last something
to show. Maud, on their parting company, had
appeared to have so much, and would now for
wasn't it also, in general, quite the rich law of Eng
lish life? have, with accretions, promotions, ex
pansions, ever so much more. Very good; such
things might be; she rose to the sense of being
ready for them. Whatever Mrs. Lowder might

[[157]]

p156 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p157w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p158

v?