She glanced at the mutton.
Not much of the leg would be left for luncheon.
It was none of her fault--since how could she control her father begetting her forty years ago in the suburbs of Manchester?
and once begotten, how could she do other than grow up cheese-paring, ambitious, with an instinctively accurate notion of the rungs of the ladder and an ant-like assiduity in pushing George Plumer ahead of her to the top of the ladder?
What was at the top of the ladder?
A sense that all the rungs were beneath one apparently; since by the time that George Plumer became Professor of Physics, or whatever it might be, Mrs.Plumer could only be in a condition to cling tight to her eminence, peer down at the ground, and goad her two plain daughters to climb the rungs of the ladder.
"I was down at the races yesterday," she said, "with my two little girls." It was none of THEIR fault either.

In they came to the drawing-room, in white frocks and blue sashes.

They handed the cigarettes.

Rhoda had inherited her father's cold grey eyes.

Cold grey eyes George Plumer had, but in them was an abstract light.