ther-bird must not hover too
confidently, too appealingly, near coveys whose preoccupations she
does not share. It might have been her looking and dressing younger
than nature justified; at forty one must not look thirty; in November
one must not, even involuntarily, wear the things of May if one would
have others believe in one's devotion to one's children in Dresden;
one alleges in vain one's impatience to join them as grounds for
joining groups or detached persons who have begun to write home to
their children in New York or Boston.

The very readiness of the Mother-Bird to give security by the mention
of well-known names, to offer proof of her social solvency by the
eager correctness of her behavior, created reluctance around her. Some
would not have her at all from the first; others, who had partially or
conditionally accepted her, returned her upon her hands and withdrew
from the negotiation. More and more she found herself outside that
hard woman-world, and trying less and less to beat her way into it.

The women may have known her better even than she knew herself, and it
may have been through ignorance greater than her own that the men were
more acquiescent. But the men too were not so acquiescent, or not at
all, as time passed.

It would be hard to fix the day, the hour, far harder the moment, when
the Mother-Bird began to disappear from the drawing-room and to appear
in the smoking-room, or say whether she passed from the one to the
other in a voluntary exile or by the rigor of the women's unwritten
law. Still, from time to time she was seen in their part of the ship,
after she was also seen where the band of violets showed strange and
sad through veils of smoke that were not dense enough to hide her
poor, pretty little face, with its faded blue eyes and wistful mouth.
There she passed by quick transition from the conversation of the
graver elderly smokers to the loud laughter of two birds of prey who
became her comrades, or such friends as birds like them can be to
birds like her.

From anything she had said or done there was no reason for her lapse
from the women and the better men to such men; for her transition from
the better sort of women there was no reason except that it happened.
Whether she attached herself to the birds of prey, or they to her, by
that instinct which enables birds of all kinds to know themselves of a
feather remained a touching question.

There remained to the end the question