...
III
Later, as he sat, hopelessly, over the dim and sterile pages of "Mortimer
Slant," Mrs. Rossiter came, heavily, in to talk with him. Mrs. Rossiter
always entered the room with an expression of stupid benignity that hid a
good deal of rather sharp perception. The fact that she was not nearly so
stupid as she looked enabled her to look all the stupider and she covered
a multitude of brains with a quantity of hard black silk that she spread
out around her with the air of one who is filling as much of the room as
she can conveniently seize upon. Her plump arms, her broad and placid
bosom, her flat smooth face, her hair, entirely negative in colour and
arrangement, offered no clue whatever to her unsuspected sharpnesses.
Smooth, broad, flat and motionless she carried, like the Wooden Horse of
Troy, a thousand dangers in the depths of her placidity.
She had come now to assist her daughter, the only person for whom she may
be said to have had the slightest genuine affection, for Dr. Rossiter she
had long-despised and Mrs. Galleon was an ally and companion but never a
friend. She had allowed Clare to marry Peter, chiefly because Clare would
have married him in any case, but also, a little, because she thought that
Peter had a great career in front of him. Now that Peter's career seemed
already to be, for the most part, behind him, she disliked him and because
he appeared to have made Clare unhappy suddenly hated him.
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