at Ashe, so handsome, agreeable,
and devoted, at his place and prestige in the world, his high
intelligence and his personal attraction, Ashe's mother must needs think
that Kitty's mere cleverness would soon reveal to her her extraordinary
good-fortune; and that whereas he was now at her feet, she before long
would be at his.

Three years! Lady Tranmore looked back upon them with feelings that
wavered like smoke before a wind. A year of excitement, a year of
illness, a year of extravagance, shaken moreover by many strange gusts
of temper and caprice, it was so she might have summarized them. First,
a most promising debut in London. Kitty welcomed on all hands with
enthusiasm as Ashe's wife and her own daughter-in-law, feted to the top
of her bent, smiled on at Court, flattered by the country-houses, always
exquisitely dressed, smiling and eager, apparently full of ambition for
Ashe no less than for herself, a happy, notorious, busy little person,
with a touch of wildness that did but give edge to her charm and keep
the world talking.

Then, the birth of the boy, and Kitty's passionate, ungovernable recoil
from the deformity that showed itself almost immediately after his
birth--a form of infantile paralysis involving a slight but incurable
lameness. Lady Tranmore could recall weeks of remorseful fondling,
alternating with weeks of neglect; continued illness and depression on
Kitty's part, settling after a while into a petulant melancholy for
which the baby's defect seemed but an inadequate cause; Ashe's tender
anxiety, his willingness to throw up Parliament, office, everything,
that Kitty might travel and recover; and those huge efforts by which she
and his best friends in the House had held him back--when Kitty, it
seemed, cared little or nothing whether he sacrificed his future or not.
Finally, she herself, with the assistance of a new friend of Kitty's,
had become Kitty's nurse, had taken her abroad when Ashe could not be
spared, had watched over her, and humored her, and at last brought her
back--so the doctors said--restored.

Was it really recovery? At any rate, Lady Tranmore was often inclined to
think that since the return to London--now about a twelvemonth
since--both she and William had had to do with a different Kitty. Young
as she still was, the first exquisite softness of the expanding life was
gone; things harder, stranger, more inexplicable than any which those
who knew her best had yet perceived, see