And it troubled her that she could not find any guidance for herself in her memories of him.
And as to the changes in her own sex, they seemed to have all come about while she was sitting in a twilight room reading aloud to an old woman.
Only a few months after her husband's death her parents had both died, and she found herself alone in the world, and almost penniless.

She was not strong enough for war work, the doctor said, and so she had let the doors of Lancaster Gate close upon her, only looking for something quiet and settled--even if it were a settled slavery.
After which, suddenly, just about the time of the Armistice, she had become aware that nothing was the same; that the women and the girls--so many of them in uniform!--that she met in the streets when she took her daily walk--were new creatures; not attractive to her as a whole, but surprising and formidable, because of the sheer life there was in them.
And she herself began to get restive; to realize that she was not herself so very old, and to want to know--a hundred things! It had taken her five months, however, to make up her mind; and then at last she had gone to an agency--the only way she knew--and had braved the cold and purely selfish wrath of the household she was leaving.

And now here she was in Lord Buntingford's house--Miss Helena Pitstone's chaperon.

As she stood before her looking-glass, fastening her little black dress with shaking fingers, the first impression of Helena's personality was upon her, running through her, like wine to the unaccustomed.

She supposed that now girls were all like this--all such free, wild, uncurbed creatures, a law to themselves.