in for all this honour.  It is she who will turn up her nose at us at the Castle next year.’  ’Ah, had I known what was going to happen it is I who would have pulled the fine feathers out of her.’  Day after day, week after week, the agony was protracted, until every heart grew weary of the strain put upon it and sighed for relief.  But it was impossible to leave off thinking and talking; and the various accounts of orange-blossoms and the bridesmaids that in an incessant postal stream were poured during the month of January into Galway seemed to provoke rather than abate the marriage fever.  The subject was inexhaustible, and little else was spoken of until it was time to pack up trunks and prepare for the Castle season.  The bride, it was stated, would be present at the second Drawing-Room in March.

Nevertheless Alice noticed that the gladness of last year was gone out of their hearts; none expected much, and all remembered a little of the disappointments they had suffered.  A little of the book had been read; the lines of white girls standing about the pillars in Patrick’s Hall, the empty waltz tunes and the long hours passed with their chaperons were terrible souvenirs to pause upon.  Still they must fight on to the last; there is no going back—­there is nothing for them to go back to.  There is no hope in life for them but the vague hope of a husband.  So they keep on to the last, becoming gradually more spiteful and puerile, their ideas of life and things growing gradually narrower, until, in their thirty-fifth or fortieth year, they fall into the autumn heaps, to lie there forgotten, or to be blown hither or thither by every wind that blows.

Two of Lord Rosshill’s daughters had determined to try their luck again, and a third was undecided; the Ladies Cullen said that they had their school to attend to and could not leave Galway; poverty compelled the Brennans and Duffys to remain at home.  Alice would willingly have done the same, but, tempted by the thin chance that she might meet with Harding, she yielded to her mother’s persuasions.  Harding did not return to Dublin, and her second season was more barren of incident than the first.  The same absence of conviction, the same noisy gossiping and inability to see over the horizon of Merrion Square, the same servile adoration of officialism, the same meanness committed to secure an invitation to the Castle, the same sing-song waltz tunes, the same miserable, mocking, melancholy, muslin hours were endured by the same white martyrs.

And if the Castle remained unchanged, Mount Street lost nothing of its original aspect.  Experience had apparently taught Mrs. Barton nothing; she knew but one set of tricks—­if they failed she repeated them:  she was guided by the indubitableness of instinct rather than by the more wandering light that is reason.  Mr. Barton, who it was feared might talk of painting, and so distract the attention from more serious matters, was left in Galway, and amid eight or nine men collected here, there, and everywhere out of the hotels and barrack-rooms, the three ladies sat down to dinner.