‘Is Mrs. Chickerel living here as well?’ Christopher ventured to inquire, when they were downstairs again.

’Yes; but confined to her room as usual, I regret to say.  Two more sisters of mine, whom you have never seen at all, are also here.  They are older than any of the rest of us, and had, broadly speaking, no education at all, poor girls.  The eldest, Gwendoline, is my cook, and Cornelia is my housemaid.  I suffer much sadness, and almost misery sometimes, in reflecting that here are we, ten brothers and sisters, born of one father and mother, who might have mixed together and shared all in the same scenes, and been properly happy, if it were not for the strange accidents that have split us up into sections as you see, cutting me off from them without the compensation of joining me to any others.  They are all true as steel in keeping the secret of our kin, certainly; but that brings little joy, though some satisfaction perhaps.’

’You might be less despondent, I think.  The tale-telling has been one of the successes of the season.’

’Yes, I might; but I may observe that you scarcely set the example of blitheness.’

’Ah—­that’s not because I don’t recognize the pleasure of being here.  It is from a more general cause:  simply an underfeeling I have that at the most propitious moment the distance to the possibility of sorrow is so short that a man’s spirits must not rise higher than mere cheerfulness out of bare respect to his insight.

      “As long as skies are blue, and fields are green,
      Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow,
   Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow."’

Ethelberta bowed uncertainly; the remark might refer to her past conduct or it might not.  ‘My great cause of uneasiness is the children,’ she presently said, as a new page of matter.  ’It is my duty, at all risk and all sacrifice of sentiment, to educate and provide for them.  The grown-up ones, older than myself, I cannot help much, but the little ones I can.  I keep my two French lodgers for the sake of them.’

’The lodgers, of course, don’t know the relationship between yourself and the rest of the people in the house?’

’O no!—­nor will they ever.  My mother is supposed to let the ground and first floors to me—­a strange lady—­as she does the second and third floors to them.  Still, I may be discovered.’

‘Well—­if you are?’

’Let me be.  Life is a battle, they say; but it is only so in the sense that a game of chess is a battle—­there is no seriousness in it; it may be put an end to at any inconvenient moment by owning yourself beaten, with a careless “Ha-ha!” and sweeping your pieces into the box.  Experimentally, I care to succeed in society; but at the bottom of my heart, I don’t care.’

’For that very reason you are likely to do it.  My idea is, make ambition your business and indifference your relaxation, and you will fail; but make indifference your business and ambition your relaxation, and you will succeed.  So impish are the ways of the gods.’