e thus, once again, was saluted by
Portland Place! Black furs of Lady Adela's surrounded, enfolded her, and
from out of them her eyes haughtily but triumphantly surveyed a
crossing-sweeper, two small children with their nurse, a messenger boy,
and Roller the coachman. To Roller this must have been _the_ dramatic
moment of a somewhat undramatic career, but stout and imperial upon his
box his body was held, rigid, motionless, and his large stupid eyes
gazed in front of him at the trees and the light cloud-flecked March
sky, and moved neither to the right nor to the left.

She was placed in the carriage--Christopher got in beside her and they
moved off. He was interested to see the effect that this breaking into
the world would have upon her. He felt himself a little in the position
of showman and was glad that he had a spring afternoon of gleaming
sunshine and a suggestion of budding trees and shrubs in the Portland
Crescent garden to provide for her. They were held up by traffic as they
crossed the Marylebone Road; drays, hansoms, bicycles passed--there was
a stir of voices and wheels, somewhere in the park a band was playing.

He looked at her and saw that she paid no heed, but sat back in the dim
shadow, her eyes, he thought, closed. She was, at that instant, more
remote from him and all that he represented than she had ever
been--Curiously he was moved, just then, by a consciousness of her
personality that exceeded anything that he had ever felt in her before.

"Yes, she must have been tremendous," he thought. And then he wondered
of what she was thinking, so quiet, and yet, from her very silence,
sinister, and then--how could he have not considered this before? What
was she going to say to Roddy?

At this, the dark carriage was suddenly, for him, as flashing with life
and circumstance as though it had been the florid circle of some popular
music-hall--_What_ would she say to Roddy?

He knew her for the most selfish of all possible old women: unselfish
only perhaps if Roddy were concerned, but there also, if some question
of her power moved her, ruthless. He had traced the windings of her
queer intertwisted brain with some accuracy--He knew also that the
coloured unreal state that her closed, fantastic life (resembling, you
might say, life inside a Chinese puzzle) had brought upon her led her
now to see Rachel as arch-antagonist in every step and movement of her
day.

She would not wish to make Roddy unhappy, sh