“I cannot help it, Jane.  I shall never knowingly bow to one even if she is related to me,” announced Mrs. Carr more assertively than Gabriella would have believed possible.

“Well, for my part, Cousin Fanny, I can’t feel that it hurts me to bow to anybody,” said Pussy, with her unfailing kindness of heart.  “Why, I even bowed to Florrie Spencer last winter.  I wanted to cut her, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it when I met her face to face.  I hope you don’t mind, dear,” she whispered to Gabriella.  “I suppose I oughtn’t to have mentioned her, but I forgot.”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter in the least,” responded Gabriella cheerfully.  “I bowed to her myself the day before I left New York.”

Though she tried to be independent, to be advanced and resolute, she felt the last eighteen years receding slowly from her consciousness.  The family point of view, the family soul, had enveloped her again, and, in spite of her experience and her success, she seemed inwardly as young and ignorant as on the evening when she broke her engagement to Arthur.  The spirit of the place had defeated her individual endeavour.  Except for the wall paper of pale gray, and the Persian rugs on the floor, Jane’s library might have been the old front parlour in Hill Street, and it was as if the French mirror, the crystal candelabra, the rosewood bookcases, with their diamond-shaped panes lined with fluted magenta silk, the family portraits, the speckled engravings of the Burial of Latané and of the groups of amiable children feeding chickens and fish—­it was as if these inanimate objects exuded a spiritual anodyne which enfeebled the will.  Across the hall, in the modern pink and gray drawing-room, the five girls were playing bridge with several young men whom Gabriella remembered as babies, and the sounds of their voices floated to her now and then as thinly as if they had come out of a phonograph.  “There is nothing better than peace, after all,” she thought, while her, eyes rested tenderly on the simple, affectionate face of Cousin Jimmy.  “Goodness and peace, these things are really worth while.”

Then the telephone rang gently, and after a minute Margaret, who had gone to answer it, came in with a roguish smile on her lips.  “Aunt Gabriella, Mr. Peyton wishes to come to-morrow at five,” she said; and the roguish smile flitted from her lips to the lips of Cousin Pussy, and from Cousin Pussy to each sympathetic and watchful face in the group.

“You may say what you please,” argued Charley, still truculent, “the whole trouble with Arthur is that he has got the wrong ideas.”

* * * * *