There was a finer instant, however, at which three
ladies, clearly a mother and daughters, had paused
before her under compulsion of a comment appar
ently just uttered by one of them and referring to
some object on the other side of the room. Milly
had her back to the object, but her face very much
to her young compatriot, the one who had spoken
and in whose look she perceived a certain gloom of
recognition. Recognition, for that matter, sat con
fessedly in her own eyes: she knew the three, gener-
ically, as easily as a schoolboy with a crib in his lap
would know the answer in class; she felt, like the
schoolboy, guilty enough questioned, as honour
went, as to her right so to possess, to dispossess, peo
ple who hadn't consciously provoked her. She
would have been able to say where they lived, and
how, had the place and the way been but amenable
to the positive; she bent tenderly, in imagination,
over marital, paternal Mr. Whatever-he-was, at
home, eternally named, with all the honours and
placidities, but eternally unseen and existing only
as some one who could be financially heard from.
The mother, the puffed and composed whiteness of
whose hair had no relation to her apparent age,
showed a countenance almost chemically clean and
dry; her companions wore an air of vague resent
ment humanised by fatigue; and the three were
equally adorned with short cloaks of coloured cloth
surmounted by little tartan hoods. The tartans
were doubtless conceivable as different, but the

[[317]]

p316 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p317w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p318

v?