Judith grew up with a faint obscure resentment against Mildred for the way she treated Fred, for her competence--her dry, unmerciful, cynical success in dealing with the world. Fred was not at home in the world: even less at home, thought Judith, than she herself; but Mildred was steeped in its wise unkindnesses. She did not seem to realize that Fred needed to be looked after. Then he died; and they became Mamma and Papa again. Mamma had been gentle, tired-looking, and pale in her black clothes, and dependent for a little while on Judith. She had not spoken much of Papa; but she seemed engrossed in sad contemplations, and her replies to letters spoke of him with tenderness and pride. But all that had not lasted long. After the first six months she had not appeared to want Judith much during vacations. She was always visiting, always travelling, always surrounded by flattering talkative men and bridge-playing scented women; and she came only once for a few hours to College during the whole three years. She had a flat in Paris, with a little room for Judith; but she expected Judith to lead her own life and to stay with her own friends, or with the one aunt, Papa’s sister, for a part, at least, of every vacation. Reading-parties, short visits to friends’ homes, long visits to the old literary maiden aunt in Yorkshire, had absorbed the time. There had been one rapturous summer month alone with Jennifer in a cottage in Cornwall; but there had never been a visit to Jennifer’s home. Her parents, she said, were too unpleasant to be inflicted upon anybody except herself; and then only for brief spaces and at rare intervals. Like Roddy, she appeared and vanished again, without a background, blazing mysteriously into and out of ordinary life. The hoped-for letter from Mariella, asking her to stay, had never come. She had not seen Mariella since the summer of Papa’s death; and had had no sign from her save one little ill-expressed conventional letter of sympathy, sent, so the writer said, from them all “to tell you how dreadfully we simpathise.” (But Martin had written a note on his own account.) The wandering vacations abroad and in England had become a habit; and now, all at once, there was home again. Mamma had come home, out of pure kindness and consideration for Judith; for she did not love it, did not want to live there, found it a heavy expense; had had, so she said, several magnificent opportunities of selling it.