m.

Charlotte Jannan and her oldest child, Sophie Lewis, were above in the
living room. The former was handsome in a rigid way; her countenance,
squarely and harshly formed, with grey hair exactly waved and pinned,
had an expression of cold firmness; her voice was assertive and final.
Sophie, apparently midway in appearance between Kingsfrere and Mariana,
was gracefully proportioned, and gave an impression of illusive beauty
by means of a mystery of veils, such as were caught up on her hat now.
They were discussing, he discovered, the family.

"It's an outrage, Howat," Charlotte told him, "you never married, and
that the name will go. Here's Mariana at twenty-seven, almost, and
nothing in sight; and Sophie flatly refuses, after only one, to have
another child. I wish now I'd had a dozen. It is really the duty of the
proper people. And Eliza Provost won't hear of a man! I tell Sophie it's
their own fault when they complain about society to-day. It's the fault
of this charity work and athletics, too; both extremely levelling.
Hundreds of women wind bandages or go to the hunt races and gabble about
votes for no reason under heaven but superior associates."

"Howat will feelingly curse the present with you," Sophie said rising.
"I must go. Borrow the motor, if you don't mind. I saw in the paper a
Polder was married." Howat Penny lit a cigarette, admirably stolid. "A
name I never repeat," Charlotte Jannan said when her daughter had left.
He heard again the echo of James Polder's intense voice, "I will."
Something of his dislike for him, he discovered, had evaporated. Howat
thought of Mariana, in her room--alone with what feelings? He realized
that Charlotte would never have forgiven her for any excursion in that
direction. He himself had been, was, entirely opposed to such a
connection. However, he could now dismiss it into the past that held a
multitude of similarly futile imaginings.

Charlotte, he inferred, had no elasticity; it was a quality the absence
of which he had not before noted. She was a little narrow in her
complacency. Her patent satisfaction in Sophie was a shade too--too
worldly. Sam Lewis was, of course, irreproachably situated; but he was,
at the same time, thick-witted, an indolent appendage for his name.
Suddenly he felt poignantly sorry for Mariana; in a way she seemed to
have been trapped by life. James Polder resembled her in that he had
been caught in an ugly net of circumstance. A great deal had