"No; but you DID ask the Wellands to announce
your engagement sooner so that we might all back her
up; and if it hadn't been for that cousin Louisa would
never have invited her to the dinner for the Duke."

"Well--what harm was there in inviting her? She
was the best-looking woman in the room; she made the
dinner a little less funereal than the usual van der
Luyden banquet."

"You know cousin Henry asked her to please you:
he persuaded cousin Louisa. And now they're so upset
that they're going back to Skuytercliff tomorrow. I
think, Newland, you'd better come down. You don't
seem to understand how mother feels."

In the drawing-room Newland found his mother. She
raised a troubled brow from her needlework to ask:
"Has Janey told you?"

"Yes." He tried to keep his tone as measured as her
own. "But I can't take it very seriously."

"Not the fact of having offended cousin Louisa and
cousin Henry?"

"The fact that they can be offended by such a trifle
as Countess Olenska's going to the house of a woman
they consider common."