But it was many days before he forgot the manner in which those two ancient rivals faced each other. It had, this encounter between them, the queer effect upon him of making him recall, as he had once or twice already in Dorsetshire, that passage in Hamlet where the ghost cries out from beneath the earth. A piece of horse-dung at his feet, as he instinctively looked away while the two came together, grew large and white and round.

“He can’t have a shred of flesh left on him down there,” he thought to himself, with a kind of sullen anger against both the women. But what puzzled him now was that Miss Gault did not rise to the occasion as he had supposed she would have done. To his own personal taste she looked more formidable in her black satin gown than his mother did in her finery; but it was clear to him, as he watched them shaking hands, that his mother’s spirit was poised and adjusted to the nicest point of the encounter, whereas Miss Gault’s inmost being just then seemed disorganized, disjointed, helpless, unwieldy.