All the younger members of the party were assembled there, with Mrs. Bellasys to play propriety.  It was her mission to be chaperon in ordinary to her daughter and her daughter’s friends, and she went through with it, admirable in her patient self-denial.  May they be reckoned to her credit hereafter—­those long hours, when she sat sleepy, weary, uncomplaining, with an aching head but a stereotyped smile.

Let us speak gently of these maternal martyrs, manoeuvring though they be.  If they have erred, they have suffered.  I knew once a lady with a lot of six, nubile, but not attractive, all with a decided bias toward Terpsichore and Hymen.  Fancy what she must have endured, with those plain young women round her, always clamoring for partners, temporary or permanent, like fledglings in a nest for food.  Clever and unscrupulous as she was—­they called her the “judicious Hooker”—­she must have been conscious of her utter inability to satisfy them.  She knew, too, that if, by any dispensation, one were removed, five daughters of the horse-leech would still remain, with ravenous appetites unappeased.  Yet the poor old bird was cheerful, and sometimes, after supper, would chirp quite merrily. Honneur au courage malheureux. Let us stand aside in the cloak-room, and salute her as she passes out with all the honors of war.

Mrs. Bellasys was a little woman, who always reminded me of a certain tropical monkey—­name unknown.  She wore her hair bushily on each side of her small face, just like the said intelligent animal, and had the same eager, rather frightened way of glancing out of her beady black eyes, accompanied by a quick turning of the head when addressed.  She had her full share of troubles in her time, but she took them all contentedly—­not to say complacently—­as part of the day’s work.  Her husband was not a model of fidelity, nor, indeed, of any of the conjugal or cardinal virtues.  He was a sort of Maelstrom, into which fair fortunes and names were sucked down, only emerging in unrecognizable fragments.  His own would have gone too, doubtless; but he had been lucky at play for a long time—­too constantly so, some said—­and a pistol bullet cut him short before he had half spent his wife’s money, so that she was left comfortably off, and her daughter was a fair average heiress.  She had long ago abdicated the government in favor of Flora, who treated her well on the whole, en bonne princesse.

It is an invariable rule that, if there is a delicate subject which we determine beforehand to avoid, this particular one is sure imperceptibly to creep into the conversation.

Mr. Bruce was to arrive before dinner, an event which we guessed would not add materially to the comfort of two of our party (how silent those two were in their remote corner where the firelight never came), so of course we found ourselves talking of ill-assorted marriages.