The early afternoon of the morrow found me in a great room--a faded,
sombre salon of the house my aunt had taken in the Faubourg Saint
Germain. Numbers of strong-featured people were talking in groups among
the tables and chairs of a time before the Revolution. I rather forget
how I had got there, and what had gone before. I must have arisen late
and passed the intervening hours in a state of trepidation. I was going
to see her, and I was like a cub in love, with a man's place to fill. It
was a preposterous state of things that set the solid world in a whirl.
Once there, my eyes suddenly took in things.

I had a sense of her standing by my side. She had just introduced me to
my aunt--a heavy-featured, tired-eyed village tyrant. She was so
obviously worn out, so obviously "not what she had been," that her face
would have been pitiful but for its immovable expression of class pride.
The Grangers of Etchingham, you see, were so absolutely at the top of
their own particular kind of tree that it was impossible for them to
meet anyone who was not an inferior. A man might be a cabinet minister,
might even be a prince, but he couldn't be a Granger of Etchingham,
couldn't have such an assortment of graves, each containing a Granger,
behind his back. The expression didn't even lift for me who had. It
couldn't, it was fixed there. One wondered what she was doing in this
_galère_. It seemed impossible that she should interest herself in the
restoration of the Bourbons--they were all very well, but they weren't
even English, let alone a county family. I figured it out that she must
have set her own village so much in order that there remained nothing
but the setting in order of the rest of the world. Her bored eyes
wandered sleepily over the assemblage. They seemed to have no
preferences for any of them. They rested on the vacuously Bonaparte
prince, on the moribund German Jesuit to whom he was listening, on the