Page:The Relentless City.djvu/192

182 She faced about, and stood opposite the elder woman.

she asked.

She paused a moment.

she said.

Mrs. Brancepeth laid her hand on Sybil.

she said,

Sybil threw her arms out with a hopeless gesture.

Mrs. Brancepeth looked at her with a wonderful tenderness and pity. She had often noticed how completely she was in the clutch of her temperament, how the mood of the moment completely blotted out all other landmarks and guiding-posts which experience from without and her own character from within might have been supposed to be of some directing value in perplexities. But it was not so with her; in such things she was a child, ruled by the impulse—not led by the reason, nor steered by any formed character. With her the present moment so blotted out the past that all precedents, all warnings, all points which ninety-nine grown-up people out of a hundred have to help