One mamma has got a start of her competitors; captured the widower as he emerges from the sombre draped doors of his mourning.
"To sing?" Lady Evie wrinkles a pretty nose. "Well, Mumsie, don't let it get past 'Violets' and that French song; they are the only two dear old Monsieur could ever get me to sing in tune."
They work hard, these mothers, for their daughters, for what is life without riches and places, and a niche in Society's walls? What waste of bringing up, of French and German governesses, of dancing lessons and swimming lessons, and dull classes, if Evie or Audrey merely married some ordinary youngster, to disappear with him upon a couple of thousand a year!
So many competitors, so few prizes. The race is to the swift, and the strong, and the astute; to the matron who knows not only how to seize opportunity, but not to release it again until it puts a ring upon her daughter's massaged hand.
So Evie and Sue and Audrey must stifle the natural folly which nature has placed in their fresh young hearts, and help "Mum" to the proud hour when her daughter will count her wedding presents by the hundred, and smile sweetly on the bevy of maidens who are still running in the race.
Some, without kindly, clever mothers, must fight for themselves, and in the fight use strange methods to attain their prize. Crooked ways, cut-off corners, wrong side of posts; yet they too smile quite as contentedly if they win at the last.
Young Golderly has been stopped a dozen times; he has seen sweet smiles, caught flashing glances. Evie has called attention to her lovely feet by knocking one against a chair. Audrey has whispered to him that she adores polo; will be at Hurlingham to-day.
"To see you hit a goal," she coos; "oh! how I shall clap!"
"She may be a little wild—my new pony," he says, his mind still full of that piece of bay symmetry, a race-horse in miniature, and slips away. Golderly had come to meet a friend who would have talked of nothing but polo ponies; he has missed him, and the pretty runners of the race strive and jostle until they bore him sadly.
He turns to slip away, to get back to his club by a round across the Park, and then gasps, smitten roughly, his hat bumping on to the path.