They spoke to her youth, and out of mere physical congruity it could not but respond.

Still, her face kept the angered look with which she had parted from Mrs.Jellison.
More than that--the last few weeks had visibly changed it, had graved upon it the signs of "living." It was more beautiful than ever in its significant black and white, but it was older--a _woman_ spoke from it.
Marcella had gone down into reality, and had found there the rebellion and the storm for which such souls as hers are made.

Rebellion most of all.

She had been living with the poor, in their stifling rooms, amid their perpetual struggle for a little food and clothes and bodily ease; she had seen this struggle, so hard in itself, combined with agonies of soul and spirit, which made the physical destitution seem to the spectator something brutally gratuitous, a piece of careless and tyrannous cruelty on the part of Nature--or God?
She would hardly let herself think of Aldous--though she _must_ think of him by-and-by! He and his fared sumptuously every hour! As for her, it was as though in her woman's arms, on her woman's breast, she carried Lazarus all day, stooping to him with a hungering pity.

And Aldous stood aloof.