upon it and sighed for relief. But it was impossible
to leave off thinking and talking; and the various accounts of
orange-blossoms and the bridesmaids that in an incessant postal stream
were poured during the month of January into Galway seemed to provoke
rather than abate the marriage fever. The subject was inexhaustible, and
little else was spoken of until it was time to pack up trunks and
prepare for the Castle season. The bride, it was stated, would be
present at the second Drawing-Room in March.

Nevertheless Alice noticed that the gladness of last year was gone out
of their hearts; none expected much, and all remembered a little of the
disappointments they had suffered. A little of the book had been read;
the lines of white girls standing about the pillars in Patrick's Hall,
the empty waltz tunes and the long hours passed with their chaperons
were terrible souvenirs to pause upon. Still they must fight on to the
last; there is no going back--there is nothing for them to go back to.
There is no hope in life for them but the vague hope of a husband. So
they keep on to the last, becoming gradually more spiteful and puerile,
their ideas of life and things growing gradually narrower, until, in
their thirty-fifth or fortieth year, they fall into the autumn heaps, to
lie there forgotten, or to be blown hither or thither by every wind that
blows.

Two of Lord Rosshill's daughters had determined to try their luck again,
and a third was undecided; the Ladies Cullen said that they had their
school to attend to and could not leave Galway; poverty compelled the
Brennans and Duffys to remain at home. Alice would willingly have done
the same, but, tempted by the thin chance that she might meet with
Harding, she yielded to her mother's persuasions. Harding did not return
to Dublin, and her second season was more barren of incident than the
first. The same absence of conviction, the same noisy gossiping and
inability to see over the horizon of Merrion Square, the same servile
adoration of officialism, the same meanness committed to secure an
invitation to the Castle, the same sing-song waltz tunes, the same
miserable, mocking, melancholy, muslin hours were endured by the same
white martyrs.

And if the Castle remained unchanged, Mount Street lost nothing of its
original aspect. Experience had apparently taught Mrs. Barton nothing;
she knew but one set of tricks--if they failed she repeated them: she
was guided by the indubita