es more endlessly between the small silk-covered sofa that stood for
her in the firelight and the great grey map of Middlesex spread beneath
her lookout. To go down, to forsake her refuge, was to meet some of her
discoveries half-way, to have to face them or fly before them; whereas
they were at such a height only like the rumble of a far-off siege
heard in the provisioned citadel. She had almost liked, in these weeks,
what had created her suspense and her stress: the loss of her mother,
the submersion of her father, the discomfort of her sister, the
confirmation of their shrunken prospects, the certainty, in especial,
of her having to recognise that, should she behave, as she called it,
decently--that is still do something for others--she would be herself
wholly without supplies. She held that she had a right to sadness and
stillness; she nursed them for their postponing power. What they mainly
postponed was the question of a surrender--though she could not yet
have said exactly of what: a general surrender of everything--that was
at moments the way it presented itself--to Aunt Maud's looming
"personality." It was by her personality that Aunt Maud was prodigious,
and the great mass of it loomed because, in the thick, the foglike air
of her arranged existence, there were parts doubtless magnified and
parts certainly vague. They represented at all events alike, the dim
and the distinct, a strong will and a high hand. It was perfectly
present to Kate that she might be devoured, and she likened herself to
a trembling kid, kept apart a day or two till her turn should come, but
sure sooner or later to be introduced into the cage of the lioness.

The cage was Aunt Maud's own room, her office, her counting-house, her
battlefield, her especial scene, in fine, of action, situated on the
ground-floor, opening from the main hall and figuring rather to our
young woman on exit and entrance as a guard house or a toll-gate. The
lioness waited--the kid had at least that consciousness; was aware of
the neighbourhood of a morsel she had reason to suppose tender. She
would have been meanwhile a wonderful lioness for a show, an
extraordinary figure in a cage or anywhere; majestic, magnificent,
high-coloured, all brilliant gloss, perpetual satin, twinkling bugles
and flashing gems, with a lustre of agate eyes, a sheen of raven hair,
a polish of complexion that was like that of well-kept china and
that--as if the skin were too tight--told esp