which were well known to be the attributes of the aristocracy.  Rachael was wonderful.  She was an Atheist, too.  When she was twelve she had decided to do without God for a year, and it had worked.  Ellen had not got as far as that.  She thought religion rather pretty and a great consolation if one was poor.  Rachael was even poorer than Ellen, but she had an unbreakable spirit and seemed to mind nothing in the world, not even that she never had new clothes because she had two elder sisters.  It had always seemed so strange that such a clever girl couldn’t make things with paper patterns as Ellen could, as Ellen had frequently done in the past, as Ellen never wished to do again.  She was filled with terror by the thought that she should ever again pin brown paper out of Weldon’s Fashions on to stuff that must not on any account run higher than a shilling the yard; that she should slash with the big cutting-out scissors just as Mrs. Melville murmured over her shoulder, “I doubt you’ve read the instructions right....”  What was the good?  She was decaying.  That was proven by the present current of her thoughts, which had passed from the countryside, towards which she had always previously directed her mind when she had desired it to be happy, as one moves for warmth into a southern-facing room, and were now dwelling on the mean life of hopeless thrift she and her mother lived in Hume Park Square.  She recollected admiringly the radiance that had been hers when she was sixteen; of the way she had not minded more than a wrinkle between the brows those Monday evenings when she had to dodge among the steamy wet clothes hanging on the kitchen pulleys as she cooked the supper, those Saturday nights when she and her mother had to wait for the cheap pieces at the butcher’s among a crowd that hawked and spat and made jokes that were not geniality but merely a mental form of hawking and spitting; of the way that in those days her attention used to leap like a lion on the shy beast Beauty hiding in the bush, the housewifely briskness with which her soul took this beauty and simmered it in the pot of meditation into a meal that nourished life for days.  At the thought of the premature senility that had robbed her of these accomplishments now that she was seventeen she began again to weep....

The door opened and Mr. Mactavish James lumbered in, treading bearishly on his soft slippers, and rubbing the gold frame of his spectacles against his nose to allay the irritation they had caused by their persistent pressure during the interview he had been holding with the representative of another firm:  an interview in which he had disguised his sense of his client’s moral instability by preserving the most impressive physical immobility.  The air of the room struck cold on him, and he went to the fireplace and put on some coal, and sat down on a high stool where he could feel the warmth.  He gloomed over it, pressing his hands on his thighs; decidedly Todd was in the