Superseded | Page 4

rate her mind, replied that she wasn't likely to forget him in a hurry; that her uncle Tollington had ruined her life, and she did not want to be reminded of him any more than she could help. Moreover, she found her aunt Moon's society depressing. She meant to get on and be independent; and she advised Juliana to do the same.
Juliana did not press the point, for it was a delicate one, seeing that Louisa was earning a hundred and twenty pounds a year and she but eighty. So she added her eighty pounds to her aunt's eighty and went to live with her in Camden Street North, while Louisa shrugged her shoulders and carried herself and her salary elsewhere.
There was very little room for Mrs. Moon and Juliana at number ninety. The poor souls had crowded themselves out with relics of their past, a pathetic salvage, dragged hap-hazard from the wreck in the first frenzy of preservation. Dreadful things in marble and gilt and in _papier-maché_ inlaid with mother-o'-pearl, rickety work tables with pouches underneath them, banner-screens in silk and footstools in Berlin wool-work fought with each other and with Juliana for standing-room. For Juliana, with her genius for collision, was always knocking up against them, always getting in their way. In return, Juliana's place at an oblique angle of the fireside was disputed by a truculent cabinet with bandy legs. There was a never-ending quarrel between Juliana and that piece of furniture, in which Mrs. Moon took the part of the furniture. Her own world had shrunk to a square yard between the window and the fire. There she sat and dreamed among her household gods, smiling now and then under the spell of the dream, or watched her companion with critical disapproval. She had accepted Juliana's devotion as a proper sacrifice to the gods; but for Juliana, or Louisa for the matter of that, she seemed to have but little affection. If anything Louisa was her favourite. Louisa was better company, to begin with; and Louisa, with her cleverness and her salary and her general air of indifference and prosperity, raised no questions. Besides, Louisa was married.
But Juliana, toiling from morning till night for her eighty pounds a year; Juliana, painful and persistent, growing into middle-age without a hope, Juliana was an incarnate reproach, a perpetual monument to the folly of Tollington Moon. Juliana disturbed her dream.
But nobody else disturbed it, for nobody ever came to their half of the house in Camden Street North. Louisa used to come and go in a brief perfunctory manner; but Louisa had married the Greek professor and gone away for good, and her friends at St. Sidwell's were not likely to waste their time in cultivating Juliana and Mrs. Moon. The thing had been tried by one or two of the younger teachers who went in for all-round self-development and were getting up the minor virtues. But they had met with no encouragement and they had ceased to come. Then nobody came; not even the doctor or the clergyman. The two ladies were of one mind on that point; it was convenient for them to ignore their trifling ailments, spiritual or bodily. And as soon as they saw that the world renounced them they adopted a lofty tone and said to each other that they had renounced the world. For they were proud, Mrs. Moon especially so. Tollington Moon had married slightly, ever so slightly beneath him, the Moons again marking a faint descent from the standing of the Quinceys. But the old lady had completely identified herself, not only with the Moons, but with the higher branch, which she always spoke of as "my family." In fact she had worn her connection with the Quinceys as a feather in her cap so long that the feather had grown, as it were, into an entire bird of paradise. And once a bird of paradise, always a bird of paradise, though it had turned on the world a somewhat dilapidated tail.
So the two lived on together; so they had always lived. Mrs. Moon was an old woman before she was five-and-fifty; and before she was five-and-twenty Juliana's youth had withered away in the sour and sordid atmosphere born of perishing gentility and acrid personal remark. And their household gods looked down on them, miniatures and silhouettes of Moons and Quinceys, calm and somewhat contemptuous presences. From the post of honour above the mantelshelf, Tollington, attired as an Early Victorian dandy, splendid in velvet waistcoat, scarf and chain-pin, leaned on a broken column symbolical of his fortunes, and smiled genially on the ruin he had made.
That was how Miss Quincey came to St. Sidwell's. And now she was five-and-forty; she had always been five-and-forty; that is to say, she had never