truth; they were square, but they were small, and she controlled her
trembling lips.

She pushed back from her forehead the black, curling hair. She was
tired; the luncheon had been a strain, and the carelessly loud words
of Caroline reminded her that she was undergoing an examination which,
veiled by courtesy, would be severe. Already they were blaming her
mother for her feet; and all three of them, the blunt Caroline, the
tender Sophia, the mysteriously silent Rose, were on the watch for the
maternal traits.

Well, she was not ashamed of them. Her mother had been good, brave,
honest, loving, patient, and her father had been none of these things;
but no doubt these aunts of hers put manners before morals, as he had
done; and she remembered how, when she was quite a little girl, and
the witness of one of the unpleasant domestic scenes which happened
often in those days, before Reginald Mallett's wife had learnt
forbearance, she had noticed her father's face twitch as though in
pain. Glad of a diversion, she had asked him with eager sympathy, 'Is
it toothache?' and he had answered acidly, 'No, child, only the
mutilation of our language.' She remembered the words, and later she
understood their meaning and the flushing of her mother's face, the
compression of her lips, and she was indignant for her sake.

Yet she could feel for her father, in spite of the fact that whatever
her accent or grammatical mistakes, her mother's conduct was always
right and her father, with his charming air, a little blurred by what
he called misfortune, his clear speech to which Henrietta loved to
listen, was fundamentally unsound. He could not be trusted. That was
understood between the mother and daughter: it was one of the facts on