Well, she was not ashamed of them. Her mother had been good, brave, honest, loving, patient, and her father had been none of these things; but no doubt these aunts of hers put manners before morals, as he had done; and she remembered how, when she was quite a little girl, and the witness of one of the unpleasant domestic scenes which happened often in those days, before Reginald Mallett’s wife had learnt forbearance, she had noticed her father’s face twitch as though in pain. Glad of a diversion, she had asked him with eager sympathy, “Is it toothache?” and he had answered acidly, “No, child, only the mutilation of our language.” She remembered the words, and later she understood their meaning and the flushing of her mother’s face, the compression of her lips, and she was indignant for her sake. Yet she could feel for her father, in spite of the fact that whatever her accent or grammatical mistakes, her mother’s conduct was always right and her father, with his charming air, a little blurred by what he called misfortune, his clear speech to which Henrietta loved to listen, was fundamentally unsound. He could not be trusted. That was understood between the mother and daughter: it was one of the facts on which their existence rested, it entered into all their calculations, it was the text of all her mother’s little homilies. Henrietta must always pay her debts, she must tell the truth, she must do nothing of which she was ashamed, and so far Henrietta had succeeded in obeying these commands. When Reginald Mallett died in the shabby boarding-house kept by Mrs. Banks, he left his family without a penny but with a feeling of extraordinary peace. They were destitute, but they were no longer overshadowed by the fear of disgrace, the misery of subterfuge, the bewildering oscillations between pity for the man who could not have what he wanted and shame for his ceaseless striving after pleasure, his shifts to get it, his reproaches and complaints. In the gloomy back bedroom on the third story of the boarding-house he lay on a bed hung with dingy curtains, but in the dignity which was one of his inheritances. Under the dark, close-cut moustache, his lips seemed to smile faintly, perhaps in amusement at the folly of his life, perhaps in surprise at finding himself so still; the narrow beard of a foreign cut was slightly tilted towards the dirty ceiling, his beautiful hands were folded as though in a mockery of prayer. He was, as Mrs. Banks remarked when she was allowed to see him, a lovely corpse. But to Henrietta and her mother, standing on either side of the bed, guarding him now, as they had always tried to do, he had subtly become the husband and father he should have been.