Violet’s eyes feasted on the bowing black coats and light toilettes, and, leaning on her escutcheon, she dreamed vividly of the following year when she would take her place amid all these noble people, and, as high as they, stand a peeress on the dais.

XX

’So you couldn’t manage to keep him after all, my lady?  When did he leave the hotel?’

‘Mr. Harding left Dublin last Monday week.’

Alice wondered if her mother hated her; if she didn’t, it was difficult to account for her cruel words.  And this was the girl’s grief, and she feared that hatred would beget hatred, and that she would learn to hate her mother.  But Mrs. Barton was a loving and affectionate mother, who would sacrifice herself for one child almost as readily for the other.  In each of us there are traits that the chances of life have never revealed; and though she would have sat by the bedside, even if Alice were stricken with typhoid fever, Mrs. Barton recoiled spitefully like a cat before the stern rectitudes of a nature so dissimilar from her own.  She had fashioned Olive, who was now but a pale copy of her mother according to her guise:  all the affectations had been faithfully reproduced, but the charm of the original had evaporated like a perfume.  It would be rash to say that Mrs. Barton did not see that the weapons which had proved so deadly in her hands were ineffectual in her daughter’s; but twenty years of elegant harlotry had blunted her finer perceptions, and now the grossest means of pushing Olive and the Marquis morally and physically into each other’s arms seemed to her the best.  Alice was to her but a plain girl, whose misfortune was that she had ever been born.  This idea had grown up with Mrs. Barton, and fifteen years ago she had seen in the child’s face the spinster of fifty.  But since the appearance of Harding, and the manifest interest he had shown in her daughter, Mrs. Barton’s convictions that Alice would never be able to find a husband had been somewhat shaken, and she had almost concluded that it would be as well—­for there was no knowing what men’s tastes were—­to give her a chance.  Nor was the dawning fancy dispelled by the fact that Harding had not proposed, and the cutting words she had addressed to the girl were the result of the nervous irritation caused by the marked attention the Marquis was paying Violet Scully.

For, like Alice, Mrs. Barton never lived long in a fool’s paradise, and she now saw that the battle was going against her, and would most assuredly be lost unless a determined effort was made.  So she delayed not a moment in owning to herself that she had committed a mistake in going to the Shelbourne Hotel.  Had she taken a house in Mount Street or Fitzwilliam Place, she could have had all the best men from the barracks continually at her house.  But at the hotel she was helpless; there were too many people about, too many beasts of women criticizing