Eastern trade. And on the top of it all, twenty years or so of recent
culture. The culture was represented by a well-filled bookcase, a few
diminished copies of antique sculpture, some modern sketches made in Rome
and Venice (for the Eliotts had travelled), and an illuminated triptych
with its saints in glory.

Here, Thursday after Thursday, the same people met each other; they met,
Thursday after Thursday, the same fervid little company of ideas, of
aspirations and enthusiasms.

It was five o'clock on one of her Thursdays, and Mrs. Eliott had been
conversing with great sweetness and fluency ever since half-past three.
That was the way she and Mrs. Pooley kept it up, and they could have kept
it up much longer but for the arrival of Miss Proctor.

There was nothing, in Miss Proctor's opinion (if dear Fanny only knew
it), so provincial as an enthusiasm. As for aspirations (and Mrs. Pooley
was full of them) what could be more provincial than these efforts to be
what you were not? Miss Proctor disapproved of Thurston Square's
preoccupation with its intellect, a thing no well-bred person is ever
conscious of. She announced that she had come to take dear Fanny down
from her clouds and humanise her by a little gossip. She ignored Mrs.
Pooley, since Mrs. Pooley apparently wished to be ignored.

"I want," said she, "the latest news of Anne."

"If you wait, you may get it from herself."

"My dear, do you suppose she'd give it me?"

"It depends," said Mrs. Eliott, "on what you want to know."

"I want to know whether she's happy. I want to know whether, by this
time, she _knows_."

"You can't ask her."

"Of course I can't. That's why I'm asking you."

"I know nothing. I've hardly seen her."

Miss Proctor looked as if she were seeing her that moment without Fanny
Eliott's help.

"Poor dear Anne."

Anne Fletcher had been simply dear Anne, Mrs. Walter Majendie was poor
dear Anne.

Her friends were all sorry for her. They were inclined to be indignant
with Edith Majendie, who, they declared, had been at the bottom of her
marriage all along. She was the cause of Anne's original callings in
Prior Street. If it had not been for Edith, Anne could never have
penetrated that secret bachelor abode. The engagement had been an
awkward, unsatisfactory, sinister affair. It was a pity that Mr.
Majendie's domestic circumstances were such that poor dear Anne appeared
as having made all the necessary approaches and advances. If Mr