No
mother was ever so filial as Mrs. Tramore, and there had never been
such a difference of position between sisters. Not that the elder
one fawned, which would have been fearful; she only renounced--
whatever she had to renounce. If the amount was not much she at any
rate made no scene over it. Her hand was so light that Rose said of
her secretly, in vague glances at the past, "No wonder people liked
her!" She never characterised the old element of interference with
her mother's respectability more definitely than as "people." They
were people, it was true, for whom gentleness must have been
everything and who didn't demand a variety of interests. The desire
to "go out" was the one passion that even a closer acquaintance with
her parent revealed to Rose Tramore. She marvelled at its strength,
in the light of the poor lady's history: there was comedy enough in
this unquenchable flame on the part of a woman who had known such
misery. She had drunk deep of every dishonour, but the bitter cup
had left her with a taste for lighted candles, for squeezing up
staircases and hooking herself to the human elbow. Rose had a vision
of the future years in which this taste would grow with restored
exercise--of her mother, in a long-tailed dress, jogging on and on
and on, jogging further and further from her sins, through a century
of the "Morning Post" and down the fashionable avenue of time.
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