Here the poor lady, elegantly dressed, and seated in the
middle of a large lonely canvas, in the blank contemplation
of a gilt console, had always seemed to Anna to be waiting
for visitors who never came.

"Of course they never came, you poor thing! I wonder how
long it took you to find out that they never would?" Anna
had more than once apostrophized her, with a derision
addressed rather to herself than to the dead; but it was
only after Effie's birth that it occurred to her to study
more closely the face in the picture, and speculate on the
kind of visitors that Owen's mother might have hoped for.

"She certainly doesn't look as if they would have been the
same kind as mine: but there's no telling, from a portrait
that was so obviously done 'to please the family', and that
leaves Owen so unaccounted for. Well, they never came, the
visitors; they never came; and she died of it. She died of
it long before they buried her: I'm certain of that. Those
are stone-dead eyes in the picture...The loneliness must
have been awful, if even Owen couldn't keep her from dying
of it. And to feel it so she must have HAD feelings--
real live ones, the kind that twitch and tug. And all she
had to look at all her life was a gilt console--yes, that's
it, a gilt console screwed to the wall! That's exactly and
absolutely what he is!"

She did not mean, if she could help it, that either Effie or
Owen should know that loneliness, or let her know it again.