The Signora had sometimes displeased some of her friends by talking in this manner and pricking their vainglorious bubbles; and she consistently felt that, according to his light, Mr. Vane was forbearing with his daughters and with her, and that they should show some forbearance with him. She was, therefore, not displeased with him for his unintentional mocking. Her cloud came from another direction. She found herself changing a little, growing less evenly contented with her life, alternating unpleasantly between moods of happiness and depression. While she lived alone, receiving her friends for a few hours at a time, she had found her life tranquil and satisfying. Sympathy and kind services were always at hand, and there was always the equal or greater pleasure of sympathy and kind services demanded to make of friendship a double benefit. But the question had begun to glance now and then across her mind whether she had been altogether wise in taking this family into her house, having before her eyes the constant spectacle of an affection and intimacy such as she had left outside her own experience, and had no desire to invite or admit, even while she felt its charm. She, quite deprived of all family ties, felt sometimes a loneliness which she had never before experienced, in witnessing the affection of the father and his daughters; and, at the same time that she saw them as enclosed in a magic circle from which she was excluded, she looked forward with dread to the time when they should leave her, with a new void in her life, and a serenity permanently disturbed, perhaps. There were little moments, short and sharp, when she could have sympathized with Faust casting aside with passionate contempt his worthless gifts and learning at sight of the simple happiness of love and youth. But these moments and moods were short and disconnected. She was scarcely aware of them, scarcely remembered that each, as it came, was not the first, and her life flowed between them always pleasantly, sometimes joyfully. She was quite gay and happy when they ran down to the carriage and hurried to the station.