her spare time (when she had any) in the
evening (thus running into debt to _Sordello_ again). At the end of the
week Miss Quincey's mind seemed to have become remarkably lucid; every
thought in it ground to excessive subtlety in the mill of her logic. She
saw it all clearly. There had been some misunderstanding, some terrible
mistake. She had forfeited his friendship through a blunder nameless but
irrevocable. Once or twice she wondered if Mrs. Moon could be at the
bottom of it--or Martha. Had her aunt carried out her dreadful threat of
giving him a hint to send in his account? And had the hint implied that
for the future all accounts with him were closed? Had he called on Mrs.
Moon and been received with crushing hostility? Or had Martha permitted
herself to say that she, Miss Quincey, was out when perhaps he knew for a
positive fact that she was in? But she soon dismissed these conjectures
as inadequate and fell back on her original hypothesis.

And all the time the Old Lady's eyes, and her voice too, were sharper
than ever; from the corner where she dreamed she watched Miss Quincey
incessantly between the dreams. At times the Old Lady was shaken with
terrible and mysterious mirth. Bastian Cautley began to figure
fantastically in her conversation. Her ideas travelled by slow trains of
association that started from nowhere but always arrived at Bastian
Cautley as a terminus. If Juliana had a headache Mrs. Moon supposed that
she wanted that young man to be dancing attendance on her again; if
Juliana sighed she declared that Dr. Cautley was a faithless swain who
had forsaken Juliana; if Martha brought in the tea-tray she wondered when
Dr. Cautley was coming back for another slice of Juliana's wedding-cake.
Mrs. Moon referred to a certain abominable piece of confectionery now
crumbling away on a shelf in the sideboard, where, with a breach in its
side and its sugar turret in ruins, it seemed to nod at Miss Quincey with
all sorts of satirical suggestions. And when Louisa sent her accounts of
Teenie who lisped in German, Alexander who wrote Latin letters to his
father, and Mildred who refused to read the New Testament in anything but
Greek, and Miss Quincey remarked that if she had children she wouldn't
bring them up so, the Old Lady laughed--"Tchee--Tchee! We all know about
old maids' children." Miss Quincey said nothing to that; but she hardened
her heart against Louisa's children, and against Louisa's husband and
Louisa