For the rest she made few friends, partly from reserve, partly from the shyness she always felt in the presence of strangers.  It was difficult to establish fundamental relations at dinners or even at women’s luncheons; social reforms were scarcely beginning to be fashionable; and apart from the reading which she did in order, as she said, “to keep her mind open,” her life narrowed down gradually to a single vivid centre of activity.  She lived in her children and in the few books she obtained from the library—­(since the purchase of books, even in extravagant years, represented gross prodigality to Mrs. Fowler)—­in Patty’s friendship, and in the weekly gossiping letters she received from her mother.

Mrs. Carr had long ago given up her plan to live with Gabriella and George; and a failure of circumstances, which fitted so perfectly into the general scheme of her philosophy, had done much to fortify the natural melancholy of her soul.  Since even so gentle a pessimist was not devoid of a saving trace of spiritual arrogance, she found consoling balm in the thought that she had refrained from reminding Gabriella how very badly the Carrs had all married.  There was, for example, poor Gabriel’s brother Tom, whose wife had “gone deranged” six months after her wedding, and poor Gabriel’s sister Johanna, who had died (it was common gossip) of a broken heart; and besides these instances, nobody could possibly maintain that Jane had not made a disastrous choice when she had persisted, against the urgent advice of her mother, in marrying Charley.  Yes, the Carrs had all married badly, reflected Mrs. Carr, with the grief of a mother and the pride of a philosopher whose favourite theory has been substantially verified—­every one of them, with, of course, the solitary exception of poor Gabriel himself.

Her weekly letters, pious, gossipy, flowing, reached Gabriella regularly every Monday morning, and were read at breakfast while Mr. Fowler studied the financial columns of the newspaper, and his wife opened her invitations in the intervals between pouring out cups of coffee and inquiring solicitously if any one wanted cream and sugar.

“What’s the news?” George would sometimes ask carelessly; and Gabriella would glance down the pages covered with the formless characters of Mrs. Carr’s fine Italian handwriting (the ladylike hand of the ’sixties), and read out carefully selected bits of provincial gossip, to which a cosmopolitan dash was usually contributed by the adventures, matrimonial or merely amorous, of Florrie Caperton.  Hard, dashing, brilliant on the surface at least, a frank hedonist by inclination, if not by philosophy, Florrie had triumphantly smashed her way through the conventions and the traditions of centuries.