so familiar to her: she would stand in the dining-room, with its
ceiling of darkened beams, and gaze absent-minded through the long
windows at the close-cut walled greenery without. The formal
drawing-room, at the right of the street entrance, equally held her--a
cool interior with slatted wooden blinds, a white mantelpiece with
delicately reeded supports and a bas-relief of Minerva on the
center panel, a polished brass scuttle for cannel-coal and chairs
with wide severely fretted backs upholstered in old pale damask.

The house seemed familiar, but she could never grow accustomed to
the undeniable facts of her husband, the children and her completely
changed atmosphere. She admitted to herself that her principal
feeling in connection with Lowrie and Vigne was embarrassment. Here
she always condemned herself as an indifferent, perhaps unnatural,
mother. She couldn't help it. In the same sense she must be an
unsatisfactory wife. Linda was unable to shake off the conviction
that it was like a play in which she had no more than a spectator's
part.

This was her old disability, the result of her habit of sitting, as
a child, apart from the concerns and stir of living. She made every
possible effort to overcome it, to surrender to her new conditions;
but, if nothing else, an instinctive shyness prevented. It went back
further, even, she thought, than her own experience, and she
recalled all she had heard and reconstructed of her father--a man
shut in on himself who had, one day, without a word walked out of
the door and left his wife, never to return. These realizations,
however, did little to clarify her vision; she was continually
trying to adjust her being to circumstances that persistently
remained a little distant and blurred.