alone! go away!" But that wasn't easy when they were face to face.
Mrs. Churchley had every intention of getting, as she would have
said--she was perpetually using the expression--into touch; but her
good intentions were as depressing as a tailor's misfits. She could
never understand that they had no place for her vulgar charity, that
their life was filled with a fragrance of perfection for which she
had no sense fine enough. She was as undomestic as a shop-front and
as out of tune as a parrot. She would either make them live in the
streets or bring the streets into their life--it was the same thing.
She had evidently never read a book, and she used intonations that
Adela had never heard, as if she had been an Australian or an
American. She understood everything in a vulgar sense; speaking of
Godfrey's visit to her and praising him according to her idea, saying
horrid things about him--that he was awfully good-looking, a perfect
gentleman, the kind she liked. How could her father, who was after
all in everything else such a dear, listen to a woman, or endure her,
who thought she pleased him when she called the son of his dead wife
a perfect gentleman? What would he have been, pray? Much she knew
about what any of them were! When she told Adela she wanted her to
like her the girl thought for an instant her opportunity had come--
the chance to plead with her and beg her off. But she presented such
an impenetrable surface that it would have been like giving a message
to a varnished door. She wasn't a woman, said Adela; she was an
address.

When she dined in Seymour Street the "children," as the girl called
the others, including Godfrey, liked her. Beatrice and Muriel stared
shyly and silently at the wonders of her apparel (she was brutally
over-dressed) without of course guessing the danger that tainted the
air. They supposed her in their innocence to be amusing, and they