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.

She got out and stood quite still on the platform, as she had been told to do.  The station was fine, with its immense windless vaults through which the engine smoke rose slowly through discoloured light and tarnished darkness.  She liked the people, who all looked darkly dressed and meek as they hurried along into the layer of shadow that lay along the ground, and who seemed to be seeking so urgently for cabs and porters because their meagre lives had convinced them that here was never enough of anything to go round.  If she and her mother had ever come to London on the trip they had always planned, she would have been swinging off now to look for a taxi, just like a man; and when she came back her mother would have said, “Why, Ellen, I never would have thought you could have got one so quickly.”  Well, that would not happen now.  She would have grieved over it; but a train far down the line pulled out of the station and disclosed a knot of red and green signal lights that warmed the eye and thence the heart as jewels do, and at that she was as happy as if she were turning over private jewels that she could wear on her body and secrete in her own casket.  She was absorbed in the sight when she heard a checked soft exclamation, and turning about had the illusion that she looked into Richard’s eyes.

“I am Richard’s mother.  You are Richard’s wife?”

Ellen repeated, “I am Richard’s wife,” feeling distressed that she had said it, since they were not yet married, but aware that to correct it would be trivial.