Page:Possession (1926).pdf/37

 cheeks. Ellen, her mother said, had a disconcerting way of studying people, of prying into their lives, even of imagining things about them that could not possibly have been true. This was exactly what Ellen did as she waited in the doorway. She regarded silently the figure that stood before her, swathed in durable serge and ornamented with a gold chain and a tiny Swiss watch out of all proportion with the size and vigor of her body.

Then suddenly Mrs. Tolliver became aware of her daughter's presence. She straightened her back and stood with the knives and forks poised in her hand beneath the glare of the ornate chandelier.

"Well," she said. "You might speak when you come into a room." Then after a slight pause, "You can finish the table. I've got to watch the pies."

Listlessly the daughter took the silverware and absently she began laying it at the places to be occupied by her father, by Fergus, by Robert. There was no place for Gramp Tolliver. He ate in the solitude of his own room meals which were placed on the bottom step of the "back way" to be carried up by him in response to a loud knock on the door of his hermitage. For eight years he had eaten thus in exile.

"Ma," began Ellen, "when does Lily arrive?"

The mother continued to pour water into the shining glasses. "In a week or two . . . I don't know exactly," she said, and then raised her blue eyes to regard her daughter with a long and penetrating look. Between the two there was a sort of constant and secret warfare which went on perpetually as if, failing to understand each other, there could be no grounds between them for trust. Now Mrs. Tolliver saw nothing but the top of Ellen's dark head, secretive, silent, as she bent over the table.

"Why do you want to know?" she asked with an air of suspicion. "You've been talking a great deal about Lily lately. . . ."

"I don't know," came the evasive answer. "I like her. . . . I'd like to be like Lily some day." 