left her.



Part 3


The call Ann Veronica paid with her aunt that afternoon had at first
much the same relation to the Widgett conversation that a plaster statue
of Mr. Gladstone would have to a carelessly displayed interior on a
dissecting-room table. The Widgetts talked with a remarkable absence of
external coverings; the Palsworthys found all the meanings of life on
its surfaces. They seemed the most wrapped things in all Ann Veronica's
wrappered world. The Widgett mental furniture was perhaps worn and
shabby, but there it was before you, undisguised, fading visibly in an
almost pitiless sunlight. Lady Palsworthy was the widow of a knight
who had won his spurs in the wholesale coal trade, she was of good
seventeenth-century attorney blood, a county family, and distantly
related to Aunt Mollie's deceased curate. She was the social leader of
Morningside Park, and in her superficial and euphuistic way an extremely
kind and pleasant woman. With her lived a Mrs. Pramlay, a sister of
the Morningside Park doctor, and a very active and useful member of the
Committee of the Impoverished Gentlewomen's Aid Society. Both ladies
were on easy and friendly terms with all that was best in Morningside
Park society; they had an afternoon once a month that was quite well
attended, they sometimes gave musical evenings, they dined out and gave
a finish to people's dinners, they had a full-sized croquet lawn and
tennis beyond, and understood the art of bringing people together.
And they never talked of anything at all, never discussed, never even
encouraged gossip. They were just nice.