life worth living in intermittent spots. He was nervous and
overanxious to appear to advantage. The young thoroughbred at the head
of the table who had given him a swift all-embracing look, an
enigmatical smile and a light laughing question as to whether he would
like to be called "Father, papa, Uncle George or what" awed him. He
couldn't help feeling like a clumsy piece of modern pottery in the
presence of an exquisite specimen of porcelain. His hands and feet
multiplied themselves, and his vocabulary seemed to contain no more
than a dozen slang phrases. He was conscious of the fact that his
collar was too high and his clothes a little too bold in pattern, and
he was definitely certain for the first time in his life, that he had
not yet discovered a barber who knew how to cut hair.

Overeager to emphasize her realization of the change in her
relationship to Joan, overanxious to let it be seen at once that she
was merely an affectionate and interested visitor and not a mother with
a budget of suggestions and corrections and rearrangements, Mrs. Harley
added to the complication. Usually the most natural woman in the world
with a soft infectious laugh, a rather shrewd humor and a neat gift of
comment, she assumed a metallic artificiality that distressed herself
and surprised Joan. She babbled about absolutely nothing by the yard,
talked over George's halting but gallant attempts to make things easy
like any Clubwoman, and in an ultra-scrupulous endeavor to treat Joan
as if she were a woman of the world, long emancipated from maternal
apron strings, said things to her, inane, insincere things, that she
would not have said to a complete stranger on the veranda of a summer
hotel or the sun deck of a transatlantic liner. She hated herself and
was terrified.

For two reasons this unexpected lunch was an ordeal so far as Joan was
concerned. She remembered how antagonistic she had been to Harley under
the first rough shock of her mother's startling and what then had
appeared to be disloyal aberration, and wanted to make up for it to the
big, simple, uncomfortable man who was so obviously in love. Also she
was still all alone in the mental chaos into which everything that had
happened last night had conspired to plunge her and was trying, with
every atom of courage that she possessed, to hide the fact from her
mother's quick solicitous eyes. SHE of all people must not know that
Martin had gone away or find the loose end of her m