'I think it very nice indeed, and I never saw you looking better.'
And thus ended May Gould's Dublin adventure. It was scarcely spoken of again, and when they met at a ball given by the officers stationed in Galway, Alice was astonished to find that she experienced no antipathy whatever towards this rich-blooded young person. 'My dear guardian angel, come and sit with me in this corner; I'd sooner talk to you than anyone—we won't go down yet a while—we'll make the men wait;' and when she put her arms round Alice's waist and told her the last news of Violet and her Marquis, Alice abandoned herself to the caress and heard that thirty years ago the late Marquis had entered a grocer's shop in Galway to buy a pound of tea for an importuning beggar: 'And what do you think, my dear?—It was Mrs. Scully who served it out to him; and do you know what they are saying?—that it is all your fault that Olive did not marry Kilcarney.'
'My fault?'
'Your fault, because you gave the part of the beggar-maid to Violet, and if Olive had played the beggar-maid and hadn't married Kilcarney, the fault would have been laid at your door just the same.'
The pale cheeks of Lord Rosshill's seven daughters waxed a hectic red; the Ladies Cullen grew more angular, and smiled and cawed more cruelly; Mrs. Barton, the Brennans, and Duffys cackled more warmly and continuously; and Bertha, the terror of the débutantes, beat the big drum more furiously than ever. The postscripts to her letters were particularly terrible: 'And to think that the grocer's daughter should come in for all this honour. It is she who will turn up her nose at us at the Castle next year.' 'Ah, had I known what was going to happen it is I who would have pulled the fine feathers out of her.' Day after day, week after week, the agony was protracted, until every heart grew weary of the strain put 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 indubitableness of instinct rather than by the more wandering light that is reason. Mr. Barton, who it was feared might talk of painting, and so distract the attention from more serious matters, was left in Galway, and amid eight or nine men collected here, there, and everywhere out of the hotels and barrack-rooms, the three ladies sat down to dinner.
Mrs. Barton, who could have talked to twenty men, and have kept them amused, was severely handicapped by the presence of her daughters. Olive, at the best of times, could do little more than laugh; and as Alice never had anything to say to the people she met at her mother's house, the silences that hung over the Mount Street dinner-table were funereal in intensity and length. From time to time questions were asked relating to the Castle, the weather, and the theatre.
Therefore, beyond the fact that neither Lord Kilcarney nor Mr. Harding was present, the girls passed their second season in the same manner as their first. Les deux pièces de résistance at Mount Street were a dissipated young English lord and a gouty old Irish distiller, and Mrs. Barton was making every effort to secure one of these. A pianist was ordered to attend regularly at four o'clock. And now if Alice was relieved of the duty of spelling through the doleful strains of 'Dream Faces,' she was forced to go round and round with the distiller until an extra glass of port forced the old gentleman to beg mercy of Mrs. Barton. At one o'clock in the morning the young lord used to enter the Kildare Street Club weary. But not much way was made with either, and when one returned to London and the other to a sick-bed, Olive abandoned herself to a series of flirtations. At the Castle she danced with all who asked her, and she sat out dances in the darkest corners of the most distant rooms with every officer stationed in Dublin. Mrs. Barton never refused an invitation to any dance, no matter how low, and in all the obscure 'afternoons' in Mount Street and Pembroke Street Olive's blonde cameo-like face was seen laughing with every official of Cork Hill and the gig-men of Kildare Street.