s from the
little room when she went softly up the back stairs to speak to Mary
Nellen. There was a light on his table. The door was open. He sat, his
back to her, his arms on the table, his head on his arms. She heard the
long labouring breaths of a creature who could have sobbed if he had not
kept a heavy hand on himself. They were, Lydia thought, like the breaths
of a dear dog she had known who used to put his nose to the crack of the
shut door and sigh into it, "Please let me in." It seemed to her acutely
sensitive mind, prepared like a chemical film to take every impression
Jeff could cast, as if he were lying prone at the door of the cruel
beauty and breathing, "Please let me in." She wanted to put her hands on
the bowed head and comfort him. Now she knew how Anne felt, Anne, the
little mother heart, who dragged up compassion from the earth and
brought it down from the sky for unfriended creatures. And yet all the
solace Lydia had to offer was a bitter one. She would only have said:

"Don't cry for her. She isn't worth it. She's a hateful woman."

VII

Madame Beattie was near, and had that morning telegraphed Esther. The
message was explicit, and, in the point of affection, diffuse.
Old-fashioned, too: she longed to hold her niece in her arms. A more
terrified young woman could not easily have been come on that day than
Esther Blake, as she opened the envelope, afraid of detectives, of
reporters, of anything connected with a husband lately returned from
jail. But this was worse than she could have guessed. In face of an
ordinary incursion she might shut herself up in her room and send Sophy
to tell smooth fictions at the door. Reporters could hardly get at her,
and her husband himself, if he should try, could presumably be routed.
Aunt Patricia Beattie was another matter. Esther was so panicky that she
ran upstairs with the telegram and tapped at grandmother's door. Rhoda
Knox came in answer. She was a large woman of a fine presence, red
cheekbones with high lights, and smooth black hair brushed glossy and
carefully coiled. She was grandmother's attendant, helplessly hated by
grandmother but professionally unmoved by it, a general who carried on
intricate calculations to avoid what she called "steps." In the matter
of steps, she laid bonds on high and low. A deed that would have taken
her five minutes to do she passed on to the next available creature,
even if it required twenty minutes' planning to hocu