And over this poor helpless blighted mother, she would watch as over a child. All the maternal instinct in her awoke under the stress of this curiously inverted position. Her remorseful memory summoned a penitential procession of bygone petulances. Never again would she be cross or hasty with this ill-starred heroine. Yes, her mother was become a figure of romance to her, as well as a nursling. This woman, whose prosaic humours she had so often fretted under, was in truth a woman who had lived and loved. She had ceased to be a mere mother; a large being who presided over one's childhood. And this imaginative insight, she noted with surprise, would never have been hers but for her father's desertion: like one who realizes the virtues of a corpse, she had waited till love was slain to perceive its fragrance. A postman's knock, as the meal was finished, made her heart give a corresponding pit-a-pat, and she turned quite faint. All her nerves seemed to be on the rack, expecting new sensational developments. The letter was for Lazarus. "Ah, you abomination!" cried his mother, as he tore open the envelope. He did not pause to defend his Sabbath breaking, but cried joyfully: "What did I tell you? Granders Brothers offer me travelling expenses and a commission!" "Oh, thank God, thank God!" ejaculated his mother, her eyes raised piously. He took up his hat. "Where are you going?" said Mrs. Brill. "To see Rhoda of course. Don't you think she's as anxious about it as you?" Salvina's eyes were full of sympathetic tears: "Yes, yes, let him go, mother." VI On the Sunday afternoon, feeling much better for the Saturday rest, and scrupulously gloved, shod, and robed in deference to the grandeur of her destination, Salvina boarded an omnibus, and after a tedious journey, involving a walk at the end, she arrived at the West End square in which her sister bloomed as governess and companion in a newly enriched Jewish family. She stood an instant in the porch to compose herself for the tragic task before her and felt in her pocket to be sure she had not lost the little bottle of smelling-salts with which she had considerately armed herself, in anticipation of a failure of Kitty's nerves. Then she knocked timidly at the door, which was opened by a speckless boy in buttons, who also opened up to her imagination endless vistas of aristocratic association. His impressive formality, as of the priest of a shrine, seemed untinged by any remembrance that on her one previous visit she had been made free of the holy of holies. But perhaps it was not the same boy. He was indeed less a boy to her than a row of buttons, and less a row of buttons than a symbol of all the elegances and opulences in which Kitty moved as to the manner born; the elaborate ritual of the toilette, the sacramental shaving of poodles, the mysterious panoramic dinners in which one had to be constantly aware of the appropriate fork.