ee him while he was in prison?" auntie pursued
inexorably.

"No," said Esther, in a voice thrillingly sweet. "He didn't wish it."

Auntie helped herself to tea. Esther made a mental note that an extra
quantity must be brewed next time.

"You see," said Madame Beattie, putting her cup down and settling back
into her chair with an undue prominence of frontal velvet, "you have to
take these things like a woman of the world. What's all this talk about
feelings, and Jeff's being unhappy and happy? He's married you, and it's
a good thing for you both you've got each other to turn to. This kind of
sentimental talk does very well before marriage. It has its place. You'd
never marry without it. But after the first you might as well take
things as they come. There was my husband. I bore everything from him.
Then I kicked over the traces and he bore everything from me. But when
we found everybody was doing us and we should be a great deal stronger
together than apart, we came together again. And he died very happily."

Esther thought, in her physical aversion to auntie, that he must indeed
have been happy in the only escape left open to him.

"Where is Susan?" auntie inquired, after a brief interlude of coughing.
It could never be known whether her coughs were real. She had little dry
coughs of doubt, of derision, of good-natured tolerance; but perhaps she
herself couldn't have said now whether they had their origin in any
disability.

"Grandma is in her room," said Esther faintly. She felt a savage
distaste for facing the prospect of them together, auntie who would be
sure to see grandmother, and grandmother who would not be seen. "She
lies in bed."

"All the time?"

"Yes."

"Not all the time!"

"Why, yes, auntie, she lies in bed all the time."

"What for? Is she crippled, or paralysed or what?"

"She says she is old."

"Old? Susan is seventy-six. She's a fool. Doesn't she know you don't
have to give up your faculties at all unless you stop using them?"

"She says she is old," repeated Esther obstinately. It seemed to her a
sensible thing for grandmother to say. Being old kept her happily in
retirement. She wished auntie had a similar recognition of decencies.

"I'll go to my room now," said Madame Beattie. "What a nice house! This
is Susan's house, isn't it?"

"Yes." Esther had now retired to the last defences. She saw auntie
settling upon them in a jovial ease. It might have been different, she
thought, if