elp ourselves; and we
should only make bad worse by trying. Unless we can look to Tom's
inamorata herself for help."

Mrs. Corey shook her head so gloomily that her husband broke off with
another laugh. But at the continued trouble of her face, he said,
sympathetically: "My dear, I know it's a very disagreeable affair; and
I don't think either of us has failed to see that it was so from the
beginning. I have had my way of expressing my sense of it, and you
yours, but we have always been of the same mind about it. We would
both have preferred to have Tom marry in his own set; the Laphams are
about the last set we could have wished him to marry into. They ARE
uncultivated people, and so far as I have seen them, I'm not able to
believe that poverty will improve them. Still, it may. Let us hope
for the best, and let us behave as well as we know how. I'm sure YOU
will behave well, and I shall try. I'm going with you to call on Miss
Lapham. This is a thing that can't be done by halves!"

He cut his orange in the Neapolitan manner, and ate it in quarters.

XXVII.

IRENE did not leave her mother in any illusion concerning her cousin
Will and herself. She said they had all been as nice to her as they
could be, and when Mrs. Lapham hinted at what had been in her
thoughts,--or her hopes, rather,--Irene severely snubbed the notion.
She said that he was as good as engaged to a girl out there, and that
he had never dreamt of her. Her mother wondered at her severity; in
these few months the girl had toughened and hardened; she had lost all
her babyish dependence and pliability; she was like iron; and here and
there she was sharpened to a cutting edge. It had been a life and
death struggle with her; she had conquered, but she had also
necessarily lost much. Perhaps what she had lost was not worth
keeping; but at any rate she had lost it.

She required from her mother a strict and accurate account of her
father's affairs, so far as Mrs Lapham knew them; and she showed a
business-like quickness in comprehending them that Penelope had never
pretended to. With her sister she ignored the past as completely as it
was possible to do; and she treated both Corey and Penelope with the
justice which their innocence of voluntary offence deserved. It was a
difficult part, and she kept away from them as much as she could. She
had been easily excused, on a plea of fatigue from her journey, when
Mr. and Mrs. Corey had call