xpectations.

"Yes I well, then..." Brandon was resuming with a shrug, which was meant
to say he still pledged himself to nothing, when Clare's voice was heard
from out the buzzing circle of her cousins: "Richard is nineteen years
and six months old to-day, mama."

"Nonsense, child."

"He is, mama." Clare's voice was very steadfast.

"Nonsense, I tell you. How can you know?"

"Richard is one year and nine months older than me, mama."

Mrs. Doria fought the fact by years and finally by months. Clare was too
strong for her.

"Singular child!" she mentally apostrophized the girl who scornfully
rejected straws while drowning.

"But there's the religion still!" she comforted herself, and sat down to
cogitate.

The men smiled and looked vacuous.

Music was proposed. There are times when soft music hath not charms; when
it is put to as base uses as Imperial Caesar's dust and is taken to fill
horrid pauses. Angelica Forey thumped the piano, and sang: "I'm a
laughing Gitana, ha-ha! ha-ha!" Matilda Forey and her cousin Mary
Branksburne wedded their voices, and songfully incited all young people
to Haste to the bower that love has built, and defy the wise ones of the
world; but the wise ones of the world were in a majority there, and very
few places of assembly will be found where they are not; so the glowing
appeal of the British ballad-monger passed into the bosom of the
emptiness he addressed. Clare was asked to entertain the company. The
singular child calmly marched to the instrument, and turned over the
appropriate illustrations to the ballad-monger's repertory.

Clare sang a little Irish air. Her duty done, she marched from the piano.
Mothers are rarely deceived by their daughters in these matters; but
Clare deceived her mother; and Mrs. Doria only persisted in feeling an
agony of pity for her child, that she might the more warrantably pity
herself--a not uncommon form of the emotion, for there is no juggler like
that heart the ballad-monger puts into our mouths so boldly. Remember
that she saw years of self-denial, years of a ripening scheme, rendered
fruitless in a minute, and by the System which had almost reduced her to
the condition of constitutional hypocrite. She had enough of bitterness
to brood over, and some excuse for self-pity.

Still, even when she was cooler, Mrs. Doria's energetic nature prevented
her from giving up. Straws were straws, and the frailer they were the
harder she clutched them.