e simply replied: "Oh,
well, there's always a phase of family parties to be gone through when
one gets engaged, and the sooner it's over the better." At which his
mother merely pursed her lips under the lace veil that hung down from
her grey velvet bonnet trimmed with frosted grapes.

Her revenge, he felt--her lawful revenge--would be to "draw" Mr.
Jackson that evening on the Countess Olenska; and, having publicly done
his duty as a future member of the Mingott clan, the young man had no
objection to hearing the lady discussed in private--except that the
subject was already beginning to bore him.

Mr. Jackson had helped himself to a slice of the tepid filet which the
mournful butler had handed him with a look as sceptical as his own, and
had rejected the mushroom sauce after a scarcely perceptible sniff. He
looked baffled and hungry, and Archer reflected that he would probably
finish his meal on Ellen Olenska.

Mr. Jackson leaned back in his chair, and glanced up at the candlelit
Archers, Newlands and van der Luydens hanging in dark frames on the
dark walls.

"Ah, how your grandfather Archer loved a good dinner, my dear Newland!"
he said, his eyes on the portrait of a plump full-chested young man in
a stock and a blue coat, with a view of a white-columned country-house
behind him. "Well--well--well ... I wonder what he would have said to
all these foreign marriages!"

Mrs. Archer ignored the allusion to the ancestral cuisine and Mr.
Jackson continued with deliberation: "No, she was NOT at the ball."

"Ah--" Mrs. Archer murmured, in a tone that implied: "She had that
decency."

"Perhaps the Beauforts don't know her," Janey suggested, with her
artless malice.

Mr. Jackson gave a faint sip, as if he had been tasting invisible
Madeira. "Mrs. Beaufort may not--but Beaufort certainly does, for she
was seen walking up Fifth Avenue this afternoon with him by the whole
of New York."

"Mercy--" moaned Mrs. Archer, evidently perceiving the uselessness of
trying to ascribe the actions of foreigners to a sense of delicacy.

"I wonder if she wears a round hat or a bonnet in the afternoon," Janey
speculated. "At the Opera I know she had on dark blue velvet,
perfectly plain and flat--like a night-gown."

"Janey!" said her mother; and Miss Archer blushed and tried to look
audacious.

"It was, at any rate, in better taste not to go to the ball," Mrs.
Archer continued.

A spirit of perversity moved her son to rejoi