Her friends were all sorry for her.  They were inclined to be indignant with Edith Majendie, who, they declared, had been at the bottom of her marriage all along.  She was the cause of Anne’s original callings in Prior Street.  If it had not been for Edith, Anne could never have penetrated that secret bachelor abode.  The engagement had been an awkward, unsatisfactory, sinister affair.  It was a pity that Mr. Majendie’s domestic circumstances were such that poor dear Anne appeared as having made all the necessary approaches and advances.  If Mr. Majendie had had a family that family would have had to call on Anne.  But Mr. Majendie hadn’t a family, he had only Edith, which was worse than having nobody at all.  And then, besides, there was his history.

Mrs. Eliott looked distressed.  Mr. Majendie’s history could not be explained away as too ancient to be interesting.  In Scale a seven-year-old event is still startlingly, unforgetably modern.  Anne’s marriage had saddled her friends with a difficult responsibility, the justification of Anne for that astounding step.

Acquaintances had been made to understand that Mrs. Eliott had had nothing to do with it.  They went away baffled, but confirmed in their impression that she knew; which was, after all, what they wanted to know.

It was not so easy to satisfy the licensed curiosity of Anne’s friends.  They came to-day in quantities, attracted by the news of the Majendies’ premature return from their honeymoon.  Mrs. Eliott felt that Miss Proctor and the Gardners were sitting on in the hope of meeting them.

Mrs. Eliott had been obliged to accept Anne’s husband, that she might retain Anne’s affection.  In this she did violence to her feelings, which were sore on the subject of the marriage.  It was not only on account of the inglorious clouds he trailed.  In any case she would have felt it as a slight that her friend should have married without her assistance, and so far outside the charmed circle of Thurston Square.  She herself was for the moment disappointed with Anne.  Anne had once taken them all so seriously.  It was her solemn joy in Mrs. Eliott and her circle that had enabled her young superiority to put up so long with the provincial hospitalities of Scale on Humber.  They, the slender aristocracy of Thurston Square, were the best that Scale had to offer her, and they had given her of their best.  Socially, the step from Thurston Square to Prior Street could not be defined as a going down; but, intellectually, it was a decline, and morally (to those who knew Fanny Eliott and to Fanny Eliott who knew) it was, by comparison, a plunge into the abyss.  Fanny Eliott was the fine flower of Thurston Square.  She had satisfied even the fastidiousness of Anne.

She owned that Mr. Majendie had satisfied it too.  It was not that quality in Anne that made her choice so—­well, so incomprehensible.