ssing her mother in the kitchen, she had formed a tremendous
resolve. And in a moment the resolve had possessed her, sending her
flying upstairs, and burning her into a fever, as with the assured
movements of familiarity she put on her bonnet, mantle, 'fall,' and
gloves in the darkness of the chamber. She held herself in leash while
her mother lifted a skirt and found a large loaded pocket within and a
purse in the pocket and a sixpence in the purse. But when she had shut
the door on all that interior haunted by her mother's restlessness, when
she was safe in the porch and in the windy obscurity of the street, she
yielded with voluptuous apprehension to a thrill that shook her.

"I might have tidied my hair," she thought. "Pooh! What does my hair
matter?"

Her mind was full of an adventure through which she had passed seven
years previously, when she was thirteen and a little girl at school. For
several days, then, she had been ruthlessly mortifying her mother by
complaints about the meals. Her fastidious appetite could not be suited.
At last, one noon when the child had refused the whole of a plenteous
dinner, Mrs. Lessways had burst into tears and, slapping four pennies
down on the table, had cried, "Here! I fairly give you up! Go out and
buy your own dinner! Then perhaps you'll get what you want!" And the
child, without an instant's hesitation, had seized the coins and gone
out, hatless, and bought food at a little tripe-shop that was also an
eating-house, and consumed it there; and then in grim silence returned
home. Both mother and daughter had been stupefied and frightened by the
boldness of the daughter's initiative, by her amazing, flaunting
disregard of filial decency. Mrs. Lessways would not have related the
episode to anybody upon any consideration whatever. It was a shameful
secret, never even referred to. But Mrs. Lessways had unmistakably
though indirectly referred to it when in anger she had said to her
daughter aged twenty: "I suppose her ladyship will be consulting her own
lawyer next!" Hilda had understood, and that was why she had blushed.

And now, as she turned from Lessways Street into the Oldcastle Road, on
her way to the centre of the town, she experienced almost exactly the
intense excitement of the reckless and supercilious child in quest of
its dinner. The only difference was that the recent reconciliation had
inspired her with a certain negligent compassion for her mother, with a
curious te