add the shame of fear, of
individual, personal collapse, to all the other shames. To feel the
street, to feel the room, to feel the table-cloth and the centre-piece
and the lamp, gave her a small, salutary sense, at least, of neither
shirking nor lying. This whole vision was the worst thing yet--as
including, in particular, the interview for which she had prepared
herself; and for what had she come but for the worst? She tried to be
sad, so as not to be angry; but it made her angry that she couldn't be
sad. And yet where was misery, misery too beaten for blame and
chalk-marked by fate like a "lot" at a common auction, if not in these
merciless signs of mere mean, stale feelings?

Her father's life, her sister's, her own, that of her two lost
brothers--the whole history of their house had the effect of some fine
florid, voluminous phrase, say even a musical, that dropped first into
words, into notes, without sense, and then, hanging unfinished, into no
words, no notes at all. Why should a set of people have been put in
motion, on such a scale and with such an air of being equipped for a
profitable journey, only to break down without an accident, to stretch
themselves in the wayside dust without a reason? The answer to these
questions was not in Chirk Street, but the questions themselves
bristled there, and the girl's repeated pause before the mirror and the
chimney-place might have represented her nearest approach to an escape
from them. Was it not in fact the partial escape from this "worst" in
which she was steeped to be able to make herself out again as agreeable
to see? She stared into the tarnished glass too hard indeed to be
staring at her beauty alone. She readjusted the poise of her black,
closely-feathered hat; retouched, beneath it, the thick fall of her
dusky hair; kept her eyes, aslant, no less on her beautiful averted
than on her beautiful presented oval. She was dressed altogether in
black, which gave an even tone, by contrast, to her clear face and made
her hair more harmoniously dark. Outside, on the balcony, her eyes
showed as blue; within, at the mirror, they showed almost as black. She
was handsome, but the degree of it was not sustained by items and aids;
a circumstance moreover playing its part at almost any time in the
impression she produced. The impression was one that remained, but as
regards the sources of it no sum in addition would have made up the
total. She had stature without height, grace