kened only to beauty. From their
cramped and uncomfortable household Grace and Nat Fulmer had managed to
keep out mean envies, vulgar admirations, shabby discontents; above all
the din and confusion the great images of beauty had brooded, like those
ancestral figures that stood apart on their shelf in the poorest Roman
households.

No, the task she had undertaken for want of a better gave Susy no sense
of a missed vocation: "mothering" on a large scale would never, she
perceived, be her job. Rather it gave her, in odd ways, the sense
of being herself mothered, of taking her first steps in the life of
immaterial values which had begun to seem so much more substantial than
any she had known.

On the day when she had gone to Grace Fulmer for counsel and comfort
she had little guessed that they would come to her in this form. She had
found her friend, more than ever distracted and yet buoyant, riding the
large untidy waves of her life with the splashed ease of an amphibian.
Grace was probably the only person among Susy's friends who could have
understood why she could not make up her mind to marry Altringham; but
at the moment Grace was too much absorbed in her own problems to
pay much attention to her friend's, and, according to her wont, she
immediately "unpacked" her difficulties.

Nat was not getting what she had hoped out of his European opportunity.
Oh, she was enough of an artist herself to know that there must be
fallow periods--that the impact of new impressions seldom produced
immediate results. She had allowed for all that. But her past experience
of Nat's moods had taught her to know just when he was assimilating,
when impressions were fructifying in him. And now they were not, and he
knew it as well as she did. There had been too much rushing about, too
much excitement and sterile flattery... Mrs. Melrose? Well, yes, for
a while... the trip to Spain had been a love-journey, no doubt. Grace
spoke calmly, but the lines of her face sharpened: she had suffered, oh
horribly, at his going to Spain without her. Yet she couldn't, for the
children's sake, afford to miss the big sum that Ursula Gillow had given
her for her fortnight at Ruan. And her playing had struck people, and
led, on the way back, to two or three profitable engagements in private
houses in London. Fashionable society had made "a little fuss"
about her, and it had surprised and pleased Nat, and given her a new
importance in his eyes. "He was beginn