Marian Character Analysis

‘Do you know what you’re a proof of, all you hard hollow people together?’ He put the question with a charming air of sudden spiritual heat. ‘Of the deplorably superficial morality of the age. The family sentiment, in our vulgarized brutalized life, has gone utterly to pot. There was a day when a man like me – by which I mean a parent like me – would have been for a daughter like you quite a distinct value; what’s called in the business world, I believe, an “asset”.’ He continued sociably to make it out. ‘I’m not talking only of what you might, with the right feeling, do for me, but of what you might – it’s what I call your opportunity – do with me. Unless indeed,’ he the next moment imperturbably threw off, ‘they come a good deal to the same thing. Your duty as well as your chance, if you’re capable of seeing it, is to use me.’

Aunt Maud’s intervention was all sharp now, and the other point, the great one, was that it was to be, in this light, either all put up with or all declined. Yet at the winter’s end, nevertheless, she could scarce have said what stand she conceived she had taken. It wouldn’t be the first time she had seen herself obliged to accept with smothered irony other people’s interpretation of her conduct. She often ended by giving up to them – it seemed really the way to live – the version that met their convenience.

She noticed with profundity that disappointment made people selfish; she marvelled at the serenity – it was the poor woman’s only one – of what Marian took for granted: her own state of abasement as the second-born, her life reduced to mere inexhaustible sisterhood. She existed in that view wholly for the small house in Chelsea; the moral of which moreover, of course, was that the more you gave yourself the less of you was left. There were always people to snatch at you, and it would never occur to them that they were eating you up. They did that without tasting.

‘But have you offered to live with your sister?’

‘I would in a moment if she’d have me. That’s all my virtue – a narrow little family feeling. I’ve a small stupid piety – I don’t know what to call it.’ Kate bravely stuck to that; she made it out. ‘Sometimes, alone, I’ve to smother my shrieks when I think of my poor mother. She went through things – they pulled her down; I know what they were now – I didn’t then, for I was a pig; and my position, compared with hers, is an insolence of success. That’s what Marian keeps before me; that’s what papa himself, as I say, so inimitably does. My position’s a value, a great value, for them both.

[…]

‘It’s a perpetual sound in my ears. It makes me ask myself if I’ve any right to personal happiness, any right to anything but to be as rich and overflowing, as smart and shining, as I can be made.’