“Oh, it’s quite right,” tittered Mrs. Pasmer.  “It would be as much as their lives are worth if they didn’t.  You can see that she rules them with a rod of iron.  What a will!  I’m glad you’re not going to come under her sway; I really think you couldn’t be safe from her in the same hemisphere; it’s well you’re going abroad at once.  They’re a very self-concentrated family, don’t you think—­very self-satisfied?  Of course that’s the danger of living off by themselves as they do:  they get to thinking there’s nobody else in the world.  You would simply be absorbed by them:  it’s a hair-breadth escape.

“How splendidly Dan contrasts with the others!  Oh, he’s delightful; he’s a man of the world.  Give me the world, after all!  And he’s so considerate of their rustic conceit!  What a house!  It’s perfectly baronial—­and ridiculous.  In any other country it would mean something—­society, entertainments, troops of guests; but here it doesn’t mean anything but money.  Not that money isn’t a very good thing; I wish we had more of it.  But now you see how very little it can do by itself.  You looked very well, Alice, and behaved with great dignity; perhaps too much.  You ought to enter a little more into the spirit of things, even if you don’t respect them.  That oldest girl isn’t particularly pleased, I fancy, though it doesn’t matter really.”

Alice replied to her mother from time to time with absent Yeses and Noes; she sat by the window looking out on the hillside lawn before the house; the moon had risen, and poured a flood of snowy light over it, in which the cold statues dimly shone, and the firs, in clumps and singly, blackened with an inky solidity.  Beyond wandered the hills, their bare pasturage broken here and there by blotches of woodland.

After her mother had gone to bed she turned her light down and resumed her seat by the window, pressing her hot forehead against the pane, and losing all sense of the scene without in the whirl of her thoughts.

After this, evening of gay welcome in Dan’s family, and those moments of tenderness with him, her heart was troubled.  She now realised her engagement as something exterior to herself and her own family, and confronted for the first time its responsibilities, its ties, and its claims.  It was not enough to be everything to Dan; she could not be that unless she were something to his family.  She did not realise this vividly, but with the remoteness which all verities except those of sensation have for youth.

Her uneasiness was full of exultation, of triumph; she knew she had been admired by Dan’s family, and she experienced the sweetness of having pleased them for his sake; his happy eyes shone before her; but she was touched in her self-love by what her mother had coarsely characterised in them.  They had regarded her liking them as a matter of course; his mother had ignored her even in pretending to decry Dan to her.  But again this was very remote, very momentary.  It was no nearer, no more lasting on the surface of her happiness, than the flying whiff’s of thin cloud that chased across the moon and lost themselves in the vast blue around it.