meet his quiet sallies, the ruffling satisfaction of her mother,
chattering on irrelevantly, but with the undisguised purpose of creating
a proper impression. How easily Stillman must have seen through Claire's
muteness and the elder woman's eager craving for an audience! And all
the time Mrs. Condor had been laughing, not ill-naturedly, but with the
irony of an experienced woman possessing a sense of humor.

And at the end, when the four had left the church together, to be
whirled home in Stillman's car, the sudden nods and smiles and farewells
that had blossomed along the path of her mother's exit! Claire could
have laughed it all away if her mother had not betrayed such eagerness
to drink this snobbish flattery to the lees....

Claire's father had never entered very largely into her calculations,
but to-night her readjusted vision included him. Stubborn, kind, a bit
weak, and inclined to copying poetry in a red-covered album, he had been
no match for the disillusionments of married life. Her mother's people
had felt a sullen resentment at his downfall--he had taken to drink and
died ingloriously when Claire was still in her seventh year. Claire,
influenced by the family traditions, had shared this resentment. But now
she found herself wondering whether there was not a word or two to be
said in his behalf. Her father had been a cheap clerk in a wholesale
house when he had married. The uncertain Carrol fortunes were waning
swiftly at the time, and Emily Carrol had been thrown at him with all
the panic that then possessed a public schooled in the fallacy that
marriage was a woman's only career. The result was to have been
expected. Extravagance, debts, too much family, drink, death--the
sequence was complete. He had been captured, withered, cast aside, by a
tribe that had not even had the decency to grant his memory the
kindness of an excuse.

Wide-eyed and restless, Claire Robson felt a sudden pity for her father.
Tears sprang to her eyes; it overwhelmed her to discover this new father
so full of human failings and yet so full of human provocation. In her
twenty-four years of life she had never shed a tear for him, or felt the
slightest pang for his failure. If she had ever doubted the Carrol
viewpoint, she had never given her lack of faith any scope. She had
taken their cast-off prejudices and threadbare convictions as docilely
as she had once received their stale garments. She had shrunk from
spiritual independenc