thing of it, but on going upstairs to wash her hands, had
found her sitting quite still on the wooden chair in her cold bedroom,
with the tears rolling down her cheeks; and how, when Ellen had thrown
her arms round her neck and begged her to say what was the matter, she
had quavered, "You took me up so sharply when I thought Joseph
Chamberlain was a Liberal. And he was a Liberal once, dear, when your
father and I were first married and he still talked to me. I'm sure
Joseph Chamberlain was a Liberal then." At this memory Ellen put her
head down on the pillow beside her mother's and sobbed bitterly; and was
horrified to find herself being pleased because she was thus giving the
nurse proof of proper feelings.

She sat up with a jerk. She was not nearly nice enough to have been with
her mother, who was so good that even now, when death was punishing her
face like a brutal and victorious boxer, bringing out patches of pallor
and inflamed redness, making the flesh fall away from the bone so that
the features looked different from what they had been, it still did not
look at all terrible, because the lines on it had been traced only by
diffidence and generosity. With her ash-grey hair, her wrinkles, and the
mild unrecriminating expression with which she supported her pain, she
looked like a good child caught up by old age in the obedient
performance of some task. That was what she had always been most like,
all through life--a good child. She had always walked as if someone in
authority, most likely an aunt, had just told her to mind and turn her
toes out. It had given her, when she grew older and her shoulders had
become bent, a peculiar tripping gait which Ellen hated to remember she
had often been ashamed of when they went into tea-shops or crossed a
road in front of a lot of people, but which she saw now to have been
lovelier than any dance, with its implication that all her errands were
innocent.

"Mother, mother!" she moaned, and their hands pressed one another, and
there was more intimate conversation between their flesh. Her exalted
feelings, as she came out of them, reminded her of other shared
occasions of ecstasy. She remembered Mrs. Melville clutching excitedly
at her arm as she turned her face away from the west, where a tiny
darkness of banked clouds had succeeded flames, round which little
rounded golden cloudlets thronged like Cupids round a celestial
bonfire, and crying in a tone of gourmandise, "I would go