ink herself masterful for making.
"But if he won't take you," she continued, "he shows at least his
sharpness."

Marian had always her views of sharpness; she was, as her sister
privately commented, great on it. But Kate had her refuge from
irritation. "He won't take me," she simply repeated. "But he believes,
like you, in Aunt Maud. He threatens me with his curse if I leave her."

"So you _won't?"_ As the girl at first said nothing her companion
caught at it. "You won't, of course? I see you won't. But I don't see
why, nevertheless, I shouldn't insist to you once for all on the plain
truth of the whole matter. The truth, my dear, of your duty. Do you
ever think about _that?_ It's the greatest duty of all."

"There you are again," Kate laughed. "Papa's also immense on my duty."

"Oh, I don't pretend to be immense, but I pretend to know more than you
do of life; more even perhaps than papa." Marian seemed to see that
personage at this moment, nevertheless, in the light of a kinder irony.
"Poor old papa!"

She sighed it with as many condonations as her sister's ear had more
than once caught in her "Dear old Aunt Maud!" These were things that
made Kate, for the time, turn sharply away, and she gathered herself
now to go. They were the note again of the abject; it was hard to say
which of the persons in question had most shown how little they liked
her. The younger woman proposed, at any rate, to let discussion rest,
and she believed that, for herself, she had done so during the ten
minutes that, thanks to her wish not to break off short, elapsed before
she could gracefully withdraw. It then appeared, however, that Marian
had been discussing still, and there was something that, at the last,
Kate had to take up. "Whom do you mean by Aunt Maud's young man?"

"Whom should I mean but Lord Mark?"

"And where do you pick up such vulgar twaddle?" Kate demanded with her
clear face. "How does such stuff, in this hole, get to you?"

She had no sooner spoken than she asked herself what had become of the
grace to which she had sacrificed. Marian certainly did little to save
it, and nothing indeed was so inconsequent as her ground of complaint.
She desired her to "work" Lancaster Gate as she believed that scene of
abundance could be worked; but she now didn't see why advantage should
be taken of the bloated connection to put an affront on her own poor
home. She appeared in fact for the moment to take the position that
Kate kept