Nan was fiercely, savagely desirous to hurt.  In the same spirit she had doubtless thrown her shoes at Mrs. Hilary thirty years ago.  Rage and disgust, hot rebellion and sick distaste—­what she had felt then she felt now.  During her mother’s breathless outbreak at Stephen Lumley, standing courteous and surprised before her, she had crossed her Rubicon.  And now with flaming words she burned her boats.

Mrs. Hilary burst into tears.  But her tears had never yet quenched Nan’s flames.  Nan made her lie down and gave her sal volatile.  Sal volatile eases the head and nervous system and composes the manners, but no more than tears does it quench flames.

4

The day that followed was strange, and does not sound likely, but life often does not.  Nan took Mrs. Hilary out to lunch at a trattoria near the Forum, as it were to change the subject, and they spent the usual first afternoon of visitors in Rome, who hasten to view the Forum with a guide to the most recent excavations in their hands.  Mrs. Hilary felt completely uninterested to-day in recent or any other excavations.  But, obsessed even now with the old instinctive desire (the fond hope, rather) not to seem unintelligent before her children, more especially when she was not on good terms with them, she accompanied Nan, who firmly and deftly closed or changed the subjects of unlawful love, Stephen Lumley, Capri, returning to England, and her infant acts of wilfulness, whenever her mother opened them, which was frequently, as Mrs. Hilary found these things easier conversational topics than the buildings in the Forum.  Nan was determined to keep the emotional pressure low for the rest of the day, and she was fairly competent at this when she tried.  As Mrs. Hilary had equal gifts at keeping it high, it was a well-matched contest.  When she left the Forum for a tea shop, both were tired out.  The Forum is tiring; emotion is tiring; tears are tiring; quarrelling is tiring; travelling through to Rome is tiring; all five together are annihilating.

However, they had tea.

Mrs. Hilary was cold and bitter now, not hysterical.  Nan, who was living a bad life, and was also tiresomely exactly informed about the differences between the Forum in ’99 and the Forum to-day (a subject on which Mrs. Hilary was hazy) was not fit, until she came to a better mind, to be spoken to.  Mrs. Hilary shut her lips tight and averted her reddened eyes.  She hated Nan just now.  She could have loved her had she been won to repentance, but now—­“Nan was never like the rest,” she thought.

Nan persisted in making light, equable conversation, which Mrs. Hilary thought in bad taste.  She talked of England and the family, asked after Grandmama, Neville and the rest.

“Neville is extremely ill,” Mrs. Hilary said, quite untruly, but that was, to do her justice, the way in which she always saw illness, particularly Neville’s.  “And worried to death about Gerda, who seems to have gone off her head since that accident in Cornwall.  She is still sticking to that insane, wicked notion about not getting married.”