“I’ve said to him:  ’Whatever are you thinking of?  And after Mrs. Hilary’s been so kind to me!  But he’s like a madman when he’s in liquor, and he says he’ll go to Mrs. Hilary—–­”

“Go to my sister?  What about?  The ruffian!”

At hearing her husband called a ruffian by another woman the shadow of resentment passed across Mrs. Hughs’ face, leaving it quivering and red.  The conversation had already made a strange difference in the manner of these two women to each other.  It was as though each now knew exactly how much sympathy and confidence could be expected of the other, as though life had suddenly sucked up the mist, and shown them standing one on either side of a deep trench.  In Mrs. Hughs’ eyes there was the look of those who have long discovered that they must not answer back for fear of losing what little ground they have to stand on; and Cecilia’s eyes were cold and watchful.  ‘I sympathise,’ they seemed to say, ’I sympathise; but you must please understand that you cannot expect sympathy if your affairs compromise the members of my family.’  Her, chief thought now was to be relieved of the company of this woman, who had been betrayed into showing what lay beneath her dumb, stubborn patience.  It was not callousness, but the natural result of being fluttered.  Her heart was like a bird agitated in its gilt-wire cage by the contemplation of a distant cat.  She did not, however, lose her sense of what was practical, but said calmly:  “Your husband was wounded in South Africa, you told me?  It looks as if he wasn’t quite....  I think you should have a doctor!”

The seamstress’s answer, slow and matter-of-fact, was worse than her emotion.

“No, m’m, he isn’t mad.”

Crossing to the hearth-whose Persian-blue tiling had taken her so long to find—­Cecilia stood beneath a reproduction of Botticelli’s “Primavera,” and looked doubtfully at Mrs. Hughs.  The Persian kitten, sleepy and disturbed on the bosom of her blouse, gazed up into her face.  ’Consider me,’ it seemed to say; ’I am worth consideration; I am of a piece with you, and everything round you.  We are both elegant and rather slender; we both love warmth and kittens; we both dislike interference with our fur.  You took a long time to buy me, so as to get me perfect.  You see that woman over there!  I sat on her lap this morning while she was sewing your curtains.  She has no right in here; she’s not what she seems; she can bite and scratch, I know; her lap is skinny; she drops water from her eyes.  She made me wet all down my back.  Be careful what you’re doing, or she’ll make you wet down yours!’

All that was like the little Persian kitten within Cecilia—­cosiness and love of pretty things, attachment to her own abode with its high-art lining, love for her mate and her own kitten, Thyme, dread of disturbance—­all made her long to push this woman from the room; this woman with the skimpy figure, and eyes that, for all their patience, had in them something virago-like; this woman who carried about with her an atmosphere of sordid grief, of squalid menaces, and scandal.  She longed all the more because it could well be seen from the seamstress’s helpless attitude that she too would have liked an easy life.  To dwell on things like this was to feel more than thirty-eight!