Mr. Donald, the family lawyer, met Gita at the foot of the stair and offered his arm. She was conscious of a ripple of decorous interest and several hundred examining eyes as they made their way to the upper end of the hall and took the seats reserved for them. There were no young people present. Polly, who had returned the night before, had telephoned that she would be over after the funeral; she would pass out if she found herself at one of those hang-overs of barbarism. Gita privately made up her own mind that it was the last funeral she would ever attend. In an effort to look grave the company was as if suddenly bereft of individuality, and all the women who possessed black gowns wore them whether they were cut in the latest fashion or not. The pall-bearers, most of them keen business or professional men, looked like expressionless mutes. Mr. Donald, who was one of them, wore a band of black cloth on his sleeve and flourished a handkerchief with a black border. Polly would have said he looked like a walking monument to conservatism, but he was an urbane and pleasant person, inclined to be fatherly in manner to his younger clients and had been sincerely attached to Mrs. Carteret. The atmosphere was sickening. The day was hot and close. Several of the women surreptitiously inhaled smelling-salts. The clergyman in his Episcopal robes droned on interminably. Not a phrase of the long funeral service could be omitted on so august an occasion. Gita felt as if she were on the verge of hysterics. At her mother’s simple funeral on the desert, where Millicent had asked to be buried—she was “tired of traveling”—Gita had felt only numbness and desolation, and had passively permitted herself, when it was over, to be carried off to San Francisco by Mrs. Melrose to await a possible letter from Carteret Manor. The numbness had not passed until she found herself alone in the train, free of solicitudes and plans for her future, should Mrs. Carteret ignore her. But today she felt a wild desire to laugh and shock some sort of expression into these portentously solemn faces. What a comedy! They were swooning with boredom and tuberoses, and what one of them had really cared for her grandmother? More than once they must have writhed under her merciless tongue. But it was an inherited ritual to attend a Carteret funeral and they were stern devotees of the passing conventions. The sonorous voice rounded its final period. There was a sigh, a rustle. Mr. Donald left her to join the pall-bearers. Mrs. Pleyden took her firmly by the arm and led her past many staring eyes to her own motor.