after all. Mark my words, she's got her Earl;
it'll go hard with her if she doesn't _stick_ to him. Betty, can't you
do something? He's your cousin. You've a right to him."

"I don't know that I want him particularly," I confessed.
"Mohunsleigh's a dear, queer old thing, and I'm fond of him; but we
haven't seen much of him at home, for years. And I know he can't be
bothered with me."

"Anyhow, he certainly ought to be here," said Mrs. Ess Kay, anxiously;
"it will be perfectly loathsome if we have to sit still and see the
Pitchley's gobble him up."

"Poor Mohunsleigh!" I exclaimed. "Why, what will they _do_ with him?"
And for a lurid instant I beheld Miss Pitchley and Carolyn as beautiful
ogresses, with their lips red--too red.

"They'll go to the Pink Ball with him, and by him. They couldn't
without him. That's what they'll _do_," said Mrs. Ess Kay, as if she
saw my cousin's whitening bones picked clean by the Pitchley family.
"And we shall have to be intimate with them, the whole time he stays."

"Oh, you needn't feel bound to for my sake. It isn't as though
Mohunsleigh----" I began; but Mrs. Ess Kay snapped my poor sentence in
two, as if it had been cotton on a reel.

"I have to think for all of us," said she; "Cora Pitchley is a
climber."

We changed our dresses (Sally says one must be forever changing one's
dress at Newport), lunched; and then at the door appeared a gorgeous
white motor car lined with scarlet, which I had never seen before. As
we all had on white, from head to foot, we matched it beautifully; and
feeling that we looked nice enough even to grace an accident, if it
_must_ come, we started to pick up Carolyn Pitchley and my cousin.

Mrs. Ess Kay didn't go, for she wasn't quite herself yet; and besides,
she perhaps thought that in the circumstances Mohunsleigh ought to be
brought to call before she met him informally. I don't know that any of
us were as sorry as we ought to have been not to have her.

The Pitchleys' house, which is called the Chateau de Plaisance, is on a
much grander scale than The Moorings. It thinks it is an old French
Chateau, and tries to convey the same impression to beholders, as do
several others of more or less the same sort. But it's a hopeless
effort. The poor dears might as well give up and resign themselves once
for all to being a blot on the exquisite blue and gold landscape;
though perhaps if they can hold out for two or three hundred years,
they may do better.