shade and music and leisure in the German gardens and woods, where we
strolled and sat and gossiped; to which may be added a vague sociable
sense that among people whose challenge to the curiosity was mainly not
irresistible we kept quite to ourselves. We were on the footing of old
friends who still had in regard to each other discoveries to make. We
knew each other's nature but didn't know each other's experience; so
that when Mrs. Pallant related to me what she had been "up to," as I
called it, for so many years, the former knowledge attached a hundred
interpretative footnotes--as if I had been editing an author who
presented difficulties--to the interesting page. There was nothing new
to me in the fact that I didn't esteem her, but there was relief in my
finding that this wasn't necessary at Homburg and that I could like her
in spite of it. She struck me, in the oddest way, as both improved and
degenerate; the two processes, in her nature, might have gone on
together. She was battered and world-worn and, spiritually speaking,
vulgarised; something fresh had rubbed off her--it even included the
vivacity of her early desire to do the best thing for herself--and
something rather stale had rubbed on. At the same time she betrayed a
scepticism, and that was rather becoming, for it had quenched the
eagerness of her prime, the mercenary principle I had so suffered from.
She had grown weary and detached, and since she affected me as more
impressed with the evil of the world than with the good, this was a
gain; in other words her accretion of indifference, if not of cynicism,
showed a softer surface than that of her old ambitions. Furthermore I
had to recognise that her devotion to her daughter was a kind of
religion; she had done the very best possible for Linda.

Linda was curious, Linda was interesting; I've seen girls I liked
better--charming as this one might be--but have never seen one who for
the hour you were with her (the impression passed somehow when she was