nk?"

"Not the half of one--if she thinks such old maid's rubbish."

"Mother is not an old maid," said his virgin sister with pinched lips.

He felt like shouting back: "Yes, she is, and so are the van der
Luydens, and so we all are, when it comes to being so much as brushed
by the wing-tip of Reality." But he saw her long gentle face puckering
into tears, and felt ashamed of the useless pain he was inflicting.

"Hang Countess Olenska! Don't be a goose, Janey--I'm not her keeper."

"No; but you DID ask the Wellands to announce your engagement sooner so
that we might all back her up; and if it hadn't been for that cousin
Louisa would never have invited her to the dinner for the Duke."

"Well--what harm was there in inviting her? She was the best-looking
woman in the room; she made the dinner a little less funereal than the
usual van der Luyden banquet."

"You know cousin Henry asked her to please you: he persuaded cousin
Louisa. And now they're so upset that they're going back to
Skuytercliff tomorrow. I think, Newland, you'd better come down. You
don't seem to understand how mother feels."

In the drawing-room Newland found his mother. She raised a troubled
brow from her needlework to ask: "Has Janey told you?"

"Yes." He tried to keep his tone as measured as her own. "But I can't
take it very seriously."

"Not the fact of having offended cousin Louisa and cousin Henry?"

"The fact that they can be offended by such a trifle as Countess
Olenska's going to the house of a woman they consider common."

"Consider--!"

"Well, who is; but who has good music, and amuses people on Sunday
evenings, when the whole of New York is dying of inanition."

"Good music? All I know is, there was a woman who got up on a table
and sang the things they sing at the places you go to in Paris. There
was smoking and champagne."

"Well--that kind of thing happens in other places, and the world still
goes on."

"I don't suppose, dear, you're really defending the French Sunday?"

"I've heard you often enough, mother, grumble at the English Sunday
when we've been in London."

"New York is neither Paris nor London."

"Oh, no, it's not!" her son groaned.

"You mean, I suppose, that society here is not as brilliant? You're
right, I daresay; but we belong here, and people should respect our
ways when they come among us. Ellen Olenska especially: she came back
to get away from the kind of life people lead in brilliant