So the legend of Miss Verinder’s wickedness slowly tended, if not yet to fade and die, at least to lose its strength and high colour. Young people yawned and refused to learn when elderly people narrated the legend for their benefit. “Hot stuff,” was she, when she was young? But all that must have been a mighty long time ago. It was as if the house walls absorbed whispers concerning her past, instead of echoing them as they used to do. It was as if the varnished front doors and plate glass windows of the straight, correct roads, conspiring with iron rails and neat rectangles of grass and gravel in the gardens of the squares, had now determined, if they could, slowly to obliterate all vivid recollection of a glaring irregularity. It was as if the whole monotonously respectable neighbourhood had said to its parasitic inhabitants, “We never experienced anything of the sort till then. Let us now try to forget that it ever happened.”
At last her family forgave her, and for form’s sake insisted that there should be some slight intercourse, although Miss Verinder herself declined or evaded any resumption of real intimacy. To her relatives it had become so very awkward to go on cutting her, and with all the children growing up, to have an aunt that mustn’t be mentioned. It was far more convenient to know her and name her again. Margaret Pratt was now the mother of five and putting on flesh rapidly. But, because of her shortness, she could never hope to be as big round as Mrs. Verinder. Eustace had married with the utmost propriety, and his wife in an equally becoming manner had given him first a female and then a male infant. It was Eustace who advised a reconciliation with his erring sister, and Mr. Verinder at once agreed.
Mr. Verinder had been badly shaken by the South African War--a rebellion, a defiance of authority, that should not have been called a war at all; during the early reverses he could not sleep at night, although he doggedly declared at the breakfast table that he was not anxious and that everything would could right in the end. He sincerely mourned the death of Queen Victoria, that august lady who had been as fond of the Albert Hall as he was himself. He described this great loss as “the breaking of a link.”