It seemed to George that he
felt emanating from the outwardly imperturbable person of his mother's
old friend a hate that was like a hot wind.
At his mother's funeral and at the Major's he had been conscious that
Eugene was there: though he had afterward no recollection of seeing
him, and, while certain of his presence, was uncertain how he knew of
it. Fanny had not told him, for she understood George well enough not
to speak to him of Eugene or Lucy. Nowadays Fanny almost never saw
either of them and seldom thought of them--so sly is the way of time
with life. She was passing middle age, when old intensities and
longings grow thin and flatten out, as Fanny herself was thinning and
flattening out; and she was settling down contentedly to her apartment
house intimacies. She was precisely suited by the table-d'hote life,
with its bridge, its variable alliances and shifting feuds, and the
long whisperings of elderly ladies at corridor corners--those eager
but suppressed conversations, all sibilance, of which the elevator boy
declared he heard the words "she said" a million times and the word
"she," five million.
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