while he himself was in Japan, and since the terms of his father's will had
been known, that Coryston had become openly and angrily hostile.

Why should Coryston, a gentleman who denounced property, and was all for
taxing land and landlords into the Bankruptcy Court, resent so bitterly
his temporary exclusion from the family estates? Marcia could not see that
there was any logical answer. If landlordism was the curse of England, why
be angry that you were not asked to be a landlord?

And really--of late--his behavior! Never coming to see his mother--writing
the most outrageous things in support of the Government--speaking for
Radical candidates in their very own county--denouncing by name some of
their relations and old family friends: he had really been impossible!

Meanwhile Lady Coryston gave her daughter no light on the situation. She
went silently up-stairs, followed by Marcia. The girl, a slight figure in
white, mounted unwillingly. The big, gloomy house oppressed her as she
passed through it. The classical staircase with its stone-colored paint
and its niches holding bronze urns had always appeared to her since her
childhood as the very top of dreariness; and she particularly disliked the
equestrian portrait of her great-grandfather by an early Victorian artist,
which fronted her as she ascended, in the gallery at the top of the
staircase, all the more that she had been supposed from her childhood to be
like the portrait. Brought up as she had been in the belief that family
and heredity are the master forces of life, she resented this teasing
association with the weak, silly fellow on the ill-balanced rocking-horse
whose double chin, button nose, and receding forehead not even the evident
flattery of the artist had been able to disguise. Her hatred of the
picture often led her to make a half-protesting pause in front of the long
Chippendale mirror which hung close to it. She made it to-night.