Publisher's Synopsis
She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there weremoments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with theirritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. It was at this point, however, that she remained; changing her place, moving from the shabby sofa to the armchairupholstered in a glazed cloth that gave at once-she had tried it-the sense of the slippery and ofthe sticky. She had looked at the sallow prints on the walls and at the lonely magazine, a year old, that combined, with a small lamp in coloured glass and a knitted white centre-piece wanting infreshness, to enhance the effect of the purplish cloth on the principal table; she had above all, fromtime to time, taken a brief stand on the small balcony to which the pair of long windows gave access.The vulgar little street, in this view, offered scant relief from the vulgar little room; its main officewas to suggest to her that the narrow black house-fronts, adjusted to a standard that would havebeen low even for backs, constituted quite the publicity implied by such privacies. One felt them inthe room exactly as one felt the room-the hundred like it or worse-in the street. Each time sheturned in again, each time, in her impatience, she gave him up, it was to sound to a deeper depth, while she tasted the faint, flat emanation of things, the failure of fortune and of honour. If shecontinued to wait it was really, in a manner, that she might not add the shame of fear, of individual, personal collapse, to all the other shames. To feel the street, to feel the room, to feel the table-clothand the centre-piece and the lamp, gave her a small, salutary sense, at least, of neither shirking norlying. This whole vision was the worst thing yet-as including, in particular, the interview for whichshe had prepared herself; and for what had she come but for the worst? She tried to be sad, so asnot to be angry; but it made her angry that she couldn't be
