more of it. But now you see how very little it can do by
itself. You looked very well, Alice, and behaved with great dignity;
perhaps too much. You ought to enter a little more into the spirit
of things, even if you don't respect them. That oldest girl isn't
particularly pleased, I fancy, though it doesn't matter really."

Alice replied to her mother from time to time with absent Yeses and
Noes; she sat by the window looking out on the hillside lawn before the
house; the moon had risen, and poured a flood of snowy light over it, in
which the cold statues dimly shone, and the firs, in clumps and singly,
blackened with an inky solidity. Beyond wandered the hills, their bare
pasturage broken here and there by blotches of woodland.

After her mother had gone to bed she turned her light down and resumed
her seat by the window, pressing her hot forehead against the pane, and
losing all sense of the scene without in the whirl of her thoughts.

After this, evening of gay welcome in Dan's family, and those moments
of tenderness with him, her heart was troubled. She now realised her
engagement as something exterior to herself and her own family, and
confronted for the first time its responsibilities, its ties, and its
claims. It was not enough to be everything to Dan; she could not be
that unless she were something to his family. She did not realise this
vividly, but with the remoteness which all verities except those of
sensation have for youth.

Her uneasiness was full of exultation, of triumph; she knew she had been
admired by Dan's family, and she experienced the sweetness of having
pleased them for his sake; his happy eyes shone before her; but she was
touched in her self-love by what her mother had coarsely characterised
in them. They had regarded her liking them as a matter of course; his
mother had ignored her even in pretending to decry Dan to her. But again
this was very remote, very momentary. It was no nearer, no more lasting
on the surface of her happiness, than the flying whiff's of thin cloud
that chased across the moon and lost themselves in the vast blue around
it.

XXXV.

People came to the first of Mrs. James Bellingham's receptions with
the expectation of pleasure which the earlier receptions of the season
awaken even in the oldest and wisest. But they tried to dissemble their
eagerness in a fashionable tardiness. "We get later and later," said
Mrs. Brinkley to John Munt, as she sat watching the sl