He parted from his mother with fond gaiety.  His sisters came out of the room with him.

“I’m perfectly sore with laughing,” said Minnie.  “It seems like old times—­doesn’t it, Dan?—­such a gale with mother.”

XXXI.

An engagement must always be a little incredible at first to the families of the betrothed, and especially to the family of the young man; in the girl’s, the mother, at least, will have a more realising sense of the situation.  If there are elder sisters who have been accustomed to regard their brother as very young, he will seem all the younger because in such a matter he has treated himself as if he were a man; and Eunice Mavering said, after seeing the Pasmers, “Well, Dan, it’s all well enough, I suppose, but it seems too ridiculous.”

“What’s ridiculous about it, I should like to know?” he demanded.

“Oh, I don’t know.  Who’ll look after you when you’re married?  Oh, I forgot Ma’am Pasmer!”

“I guess we shall be able to look after ourselves,” said Dan; a little sulkily.

“Yes, if you’ll be allowed to,” insinuated his sister.

They spoke at the end of a talk in which he had fretted at the reticence of both his sister and his father concerning the Pasmers, whom they had just been to see.  He was vexed with his father, because he felt that he had been influenced by Eunice, and had somehow gone back on him.  He was vexed and he was grieved because his father had left them at the door of the hotel without saying anything in praise of Alice, beyond the generalities that would not carry favour with Eunice; and he was depressed with a certain sense of Alice’s father and mother, which seemed to have imparted itself to him from the others, and to be the Mavering opinion of them.  He could no longer see Mrs. Pasmer harmless if trivial, and good-hearted if inveterately scheming; he could not see the dignity and refinement which he had believed in Mr. Pasmer; they had both suffered a sort of shrinkage or collapse, from which he could not rehabilitate them.  But this would have been nothing if his sister’s and his father’s eyes, through which he seemed to have been looking, had not shown him Alice in a light in which she appeared strange and queer almost to eccentricity.  He was hurt at this effect from their want of sympathy, his pride was touched, and he said to himself that he should not fish for Eunice’s praise; but he found himself saying, without surprise, “I suppose you will do what you can to prejudice mother and Min.”

“Isn’t that a little previous?” asked Eunice.  “Have I said anything against Miss Pasmer?”

“You haven’t because you couldn’t,” said Dan, with foolish bitterness.

“Oh, I don’t know about that.  She’s a human being, I suppose—­at least that was the impression I got from her parentage.”

“What have you got to say against her parents?” demanded Dan savagely.