to what remained of the ceremony; he ignored the passage of Polder, with Harriet Polder on his arm; the relief of the unspeakable child carrying the white velvet cushion no longer in the manner of a hot plate; the united bridesmaids and ushers.  “Thank heaven, that’s over!” he ejaculated in the deeply-comfortable space of the Jannan’s motor laundalet.  “But it isn’t,” Mariana said briefly.  She sat silent, with her head turned from him, through the remainder of the short drive about Rittenhouse Square.  Then she went abruptly to her room.

Charlotte Jannan and her oldest child, Sophie Lewis, were above in the living room.  The former was handsome in a rigid way; her countenance, squarely and harshly formed, with grey hair exactly waved and pinned, had an expression of cold firmness; her voice was assertive and final.  Sophie, apparently midway in appearance between Kingsfrere and Mariana, was gracefully proportioned, and gave an impression of illusive beauty by means of a mystery of veils, such as were caught up on her hat now.  They were discussing, he discovered, the family.

“It’s an outrage, Howat,” Charlotte told him, “you never married, and that the name will go.  Here’s Mariana at twenty-seven, almost, and nothing in sight; and Sophie flatly refuses, after only one, to have another child.  I wish now I’d had a dozen.  It is really the duty of the proper people.  And Eliza Provost won’t hear of a man!  I tell Sophie it’s their own fault when they complain about society to-day.  It’s the fault of this charity work and athletics, too; both extremely levelling.  Hundreds of women wind bandages or go to the hunt races and gabble about votes for no reason under heaven but superior associates.”

“Howat will feelingly curse the present with you,” Sophie said rising.  “I must go.  Borrow the motor, if you don’t mind.  I saw in the paper a Polder was married.”  Howat Penny lit a cigarette, admirably stolid.  “A name I never repeat,” Charlotte Jannan said when her daughter had left.  He heard again the echo of James Polder’s intense voice, “I will.”  Something of his dislike for him, he discovered, had evaporated.  Howat thought of Mariana, in her room—­alone with what feelings?  He realized that Charlotte would never have forgiven her for any excursion in that direction.  He himself had been, was, entirely opposed to such a connection.  However, he could now dismiss it into the past that held a multitude of similarly futile imaginings.

Charlotte, he inferred, had no elasticity; it was a quality the absence of which he had not before noted.  She was a little narrow in her complacency.  Her patent satisfaction in Sophie was a shade too—­too worldly.  Sam Lewis was, of course, irreproachably situated; but he was, at the same time, thick-witted, an indolent appendage for his name.  Suddenly he felt poignantly sorry for Mariana; in a way she seemed to have been trapped by life.  James Polder resembled her in that he had been caught in an ugly