This sharp reminder of the way they had conspired together to cover the blank wall of daily life with a trellis of trivial laughter made her stare under knitted brows at the companionship that was to be hers henceforward. It could not be as good as that. Indeed, from such slender intimations as she had received, it was not going to be good at all. Her inflexibly honest aesthetic sense had made her lay by Mrs. Yaverland's letters with the few trinkets and papers she desired to keep for ever, because they were written in such an exquisite script, each black word written so finely and placed so fastidiously on the thick, rough, white paper, and she felt it a duty to do honour to all lovely things. But their contents had increased her sense of bereavement. They had come like a north wind blowing into a room that is already cold. She had not wished to find them so, for she disliked becoming so nearly the subject of a comic song as a woman who hates her mother-in-law. But it was really the fact that they had the air of letters written by someone who was sceptical of the very existence of the addressee and had sent them merely to humour some third person. And where the expressions were strong she felt that they were qualified by their own terseness. Old people, she felt, ought to write fluently kind things in a running Italian hand. She was annoyed too by the way Richard always spoke of her as Marion. Even the anecdotes he recounted to show how brave and wise his mother was left Ellen a little tight-lipped. He said she was in favour of Woman's Suffrage, but it was almost as bad as being against it to have such gifts and never to have done anything with them, and to have been economically independent all the days of her life. It became evident from the way that a kind of heated physical ill-breeding seemed to fall on everybody in the carriage, and the way they began to lurch against each other and pull packages off the rack and from under the seat with disregard for each other's comfort, that they were approaching the end of the journey; and she began to think of Marion with terror and vindictiveness, and this abstinence from a career became a sinister manifestation of that lack of spiritual sinew which had made her succumb to a bad man and handicap Richard with illegitimacy. She prefigured her swarthy and obese.