"I suppose it isn't such a small thing to live by her. If I were not
successful, we could certainly not live here. It might have been
Islington and omnibuses," and she smiled.

"As if that were all. Probably, as real companions we might have been
even happier in Islington."

Lorraine stiffened. "Companions!... Ah, I, with whom else ever
dancing attendance, and changing in identity every few months?"

But she made no comment, for the days of her hot-headed, deep-hearted
judging were over; and from behind inscrutable eyes she looked upon the
things that one sees without seeming to see them, and accepted facts
that hurt her very soul, with a callous, cynical air that defied the
keenest shafts of probing.

It was her armour in an envious, merciless world, that would have
rejoiced before her eyes if it could have driven in a barbed arrow even
through her mother.

More than once a jealous enemy had tried and failed, routed utterly by
Lorraine's cynical, cool treatment of a fact that she knew no
persuasion nor arguing could have helped her to refute. She did not
even weep about it now in secret.

It was as though she had shed all the tears she had to shed during that
year of utter revulsion spent in the Italian Riviera, companied by the
passionless solitudes of snowtopped mountains. Something of a great
patience and a great gentleness had come to her then, helping her to