With this appreciation, Minerva held her mistress stupid not to have achieved more. What was a maiden lady at nearly seventy, after all? Minerva’s dull sister had done better for herself; she had a husband, the rank of matron. Minerva discounted Miss Carrington’s fierce pride in being Miss Anne Carrington, of the original Cleavedge Carringtons--perhaps because it was too fierce? Minerva knew her mistress’s faults even better than her friends did, but not the same faults. To her friends Miss Carrington was generous, unselfish, nobly, though faultily, scornful of these virtues in herself, too detached to practise them as virtues, just as she was too much engrossed in her pursuits to be lonely. Minerva knew that she was not generous, though she lavished money; that she was bound on all sides by herself, for which self and through which self she saw all things, beyond which she never aspired. Minerva knew that she was so far from detachment that all her thoughts were chained to Anne Carrington, except when they reached out to Kit, who was but another form of her self-seeking. Minerva knew that Miss Carrington’s temper was difficult, not less so that the restrictions which she put upon its vent made it fairly good-mannered. And, finally, Minerva knew that her mistress was neither indifferent to her reputation nor so happy in the use of her clever brain that she was not lonely. She knew that Miss Carrington was cruelly lonely; that her loneliness was growing inward, feeding, battening upon her; that her daily fight was against her fear of the dark, the dark that was within. Minerva loved her mistress and detested her. Nothing could have induced her to leave her, nor to forego her daily anathemas of her. Miss Carrington depended upon Minerva and detested her; leaned upon the keenness of the judgments of her class; called her by word and act a fool; berated her sarcastically; walked on tip-toe for fear of her; told herself that she would not keep Minerva beyond the season then passing; would have deprived herself of all else to retain her. It was a curious relation, a strange attitude, equally contradictory on both sides, but it was one common between two women who are rivetted together, whether as mistress and maid, friends or sisters, or even, not infrequently, mother and daughter. Miss Carrington had ordered lunch hurried, and had finished it when Minerva returned. It had seemed to her an unreasonably long time that she was kept waiting; she greeted Minerva with the remark that she had been forever when she came in. “It took as long as it took,” remarked Minerva, laying upon the table a small packet tied around its middle with a cotton string. “Cocoa is two cents more at Allen’s than it is at Boothby’s, but that’s only a postage stamp, and often and often there’s little news in a letter though it overweighs.” Minerva dearly loved sybilline utterances. “Did you meet Mrs. Lumley and was she satisfactory?” Miss Carrington asked.