Melia also felt very uncomfortable. She couldn't find a word to say and the children stared at her. But she sat on the edge of a chair that Gerty provided; tea, bread and butter and cake were given her; she began to eat and drink mechanically, but still she felt strangely hostile and unhappy. She resented the bright plumage, the amazing prosperity of those among whom she had been born; above all, she resented Ethel's superciliousness and Gerty's patronage. Ethel, of course, had a right to be supercilious, and that fact was an added barb. Her light shone. SHE was the only one who had shed any luster on the family; her marriage with a doctor rising to eminence in the town was a model of judicious ambition. Ethel "had done very well for herself," and even the set of her hat, black tulle and white feathers and the opulent lines of her spotted muslin dress, seemed to proclaim it. Her bearing completed the picture. She had not been in the same room with Amelia for many years, although she had passed her once or twice in the street without speaking; and at the moment her judicious mind was fully engaged with the problem as to whether Gwenneth and Gwladys could or could not call her "Auntie." Finally, but not at once, the answer was in the negative. Amelia, without a word to say for herself, and suffering acutely from a social awkwardness which a lonely life in sordid circumstances had made much worse, was altogether out of it. Ethel and Gerty had charm and elegance; they spoke a different language; they might have belonged to a different race. Amelia's natural ally should have been her mother. They had much in common but that depressed and inefficient woman was nearly as tongue-tied as her eldest daughter. Ethel and Gerty were almost as far beyond the range of Maria as they were beyond the range of Amelia; their expensive clothes and their correct talk of This and That and These and Those, with clear, high-pitched intonation filled her with dismay. Maria, even in her own drawing-room, was in such awe of them that she could make no overtures to Amelia, although she simply longed to point to the vacant sofa beside her and to say, "Come and sit over here, my dear." The eldest daughter of the house bitterly regretted the folly that had brought her among them again after so many years of outlawry. But in a few minutes her father came in and then she got on better. He was the real cause of her present sufferings, but his own freedom from self-consciousness or the least tendency to pose amid surroundings which seemed to crave that form of weakness was exactly what the situation called for.