e hall, was conscious of
a curious reversal of mood. There was something about the luxury of
the Welland house and the density of the Welland atmosphere, so charged
with minute observances and exactions, that always stole into his
system like a narcotic. The heavy carpets, the watchful servants, the
perpetually reminding tick of disciplined clocks, the perpetually
renewed stack of cards and invitations on the hall table, the whole
chain of tyrannical trifles binding one hour to the next, and each
member of the household to all the others, made any less systematised
and affluent existence seem unreal and precarious. But now it was the
Welland house, and the life he was expected to lead in it, that had
become unreal and irrelevant, and the brief scene on the shore, when he
had stood irresolute, halfway down the bank, was as close to him as the
blood in his veins.

All night he lay awake in the big chintz bedroom at May's side,
watching the moonlight slant along the carpet, and thinking of Ellen
Olenska driving home across the gleaming beaches behind Beaufort's
trotters.

XXII.

"A party for the Blenkers--the Blenkers?"

Mr. Welland laid down his knife and fork and looked anxiously and
incredulously across the luncheon-table at his wife, who, adjusting her
gold eye-glasses, read aloud, in the tone of high comedy:

"Professor and Mrs. Emerson Sillerton request the pleasure of Mr. and
Mrs. Welland's company at the meeting of the Wednesday Afternoon Club
on August 25th at 3 o'clock punctually. To meet Mrs. and the Misses
Blenker.

"Red Gables, Catherine Street. R. S. V. P."

"Good gracious--" Mr. Welland gasped, as if a second reading had been
necessary to bring the monstrous absurdity of the thing home to him.

"Poor Amy Sillerton--you never can tell what her husband will do next,"
Mrs. Welland sighed. "I suppose he's just discovered the Blenkers."

Professor Emerson Sillerton was a thorn in the side of Newport society;
and a thorn that could not be plucked out, for it grew on a venerable
and venerated family tree. He was, as people said, a man who had had
"every advantage." His father was Sillerton Jackson's uncle, his
mother a Pennilow of Boston; on each side there was wealth and
position, and mutual suitability. Nothing--as Mrs. Welland had often
remarked--nothing on earth obliged Emerson Sillerton to be an
archaeologist, or indeed a Professor of any sort, or to live in Newport
in winter, or do