apparently no effect at all, and the girl was wise enough to know
that this was not simply on account of the general line of non-
allusion taken by the extremely pretty woman before her, who looked
like her elder sister. Mrs. Tramore had never manifested, to her
daughter, the slightest consciousness that her position was peculiar;
but the recollection of something more than that fine policy was
required to explain such a failure, to appreciate Rose's sacrifice.
It was simply a fresh reminder that she had never appreciated
anything, that she was nothing but a tinted and stippled surface.
Her situation was peculiar indeed. She had been the heroine of a
scandal which had grown dim only because, in the eyes of the London
world, it paled in the lurid light of the contemporaneous. That
attention had been fixed on it for several days, fifteen years
before; there had been a high relish of the vivid evidence as to his
wife's misconduct with which, in the divorce-court, Charles Tramore
had judged well to regale a cynical public. The case was pronounced
awfully bad, and he obtained his decree. The folly of the wife had
been inconceivable, in spite of other examples: she had quitted her
children, she had followed the "other fellow" abroad. The other
fellow hadn't married her, not having had time: he had lost his life
in the Mediterranean by the capsizing of a boat, before the
prohibitory term had expired.

Mrs. Tramore had striven to extract from this accident something of
the austerity of widowhood; but her mourning only made her deviation
more public, she was a widow whose husband was awkwardly alive. She
had not prowled about the Continent on the classic lines; she had
come back to London to take her chance. But London would give her no
chance, would have nothing to say to her; as many persons had
remarked, you could never tell how London would behave. It would not