m straight to
her keeping. "Poor dears" had their instant claim upon her. Her mother
and sister were "poor dears" and she had suffered from them now during
many years. Francis Breton was most assuredly a "poor dear!"

Here the Duchess a little flung her shadow and confused the mind.
Although Lizzie had never seen that splendid figure she was,
nevertheless, acutely conscious of her. She was conscious of her through
her own imagination, through her mother, finally through Lady Adela.

Her imagination painted the old lady, the room, the furniture fantastic,
strangely coloured, always with dramatic effect. Her picture was never
precisely defined, but in its very vagueness lay its terrors and its
omens.

Miss Rand, the most practical and collected of young women, could never
pass the Duchess's door without a "creep."

Through her mother the Duchess came to her as the head of society.
Society had never troubled Lizzie's visions of Life. She had, in her
years with the Beaminsters, seen it pass before her with all its comedy
and pathos, and the figures that had been concerned in that procession
had seemed to her exactly like the figures in any other procession
except that they were dressed for their especial "subject." But oddly
enough when, through her own observation, this life, seen accurately at
first hand, amounted only to any other life, seen through the eyes of
her mother, it achieved another size.

She knew that her mother was a foolish woman, that her mother's opinions
on life were absurd and untrue, and yet that dim, great figure that the
Duchess assumed in her mother's eyes, in some odd way impressed her.

Lastly, and most strikingly of all, came Lady Adela's conception to her.
Lady Adela was in terror of her mother; everyone knew it, friends,
relations, servants. Lizzie herself saw it in a thousand different
ways--saw it when Lady Adela spoke of her, saw it in the way that Lady
Adela addressed Dorchester when that grim woman was interviewed by her,
saw it when Lady Adela was suddenly summoned to that room upstairs.

Lizzie, during the hours when she was writing from Lady Adela's
dictation or working with her, found her dry, stupid, sometimes kind,
never emotional. It was to her, therefore, the most convincing proof of
the Duchess's power, this emotion, this alarm drawn from so dry a heart.

Now the influence that the Duchess had upon Lizzie was always a confused
one. Persuasion from this source followed line