In the fevered, rapid, deep-dipping whirl of the life which was the only one she knew, she had often seen rather trying things happen—almost unnatural changes in situations. People had overcome the folly of being afraid to alter their minds and their views about what they had temporarily believed were permanent bonds and emotions. Bonds had become old fogeyish. Marriages went to pieces, the parties in love affairs engaged in a sort of “dance down the middle” and turn other people’s partners. The rearrangement of figures sometimes made for great witticism. Occasionally people laughed at themselves as at each other. The admirers of engaging matrons had been known to renew their youth at the coming-out balls of lovely daughters in their early teens, and to end by assuming the flowery chains of a new allegiance. Time had, of course, been when such a _volte face_ would have aroused condemnation and indignant discussion, but a humorous leniency spent but little time in selecting terms of severity. Feather had known of several such _contretemps_ ending in quite brilliant matches. The enchanting mothers usually consoled themselves with great ease, and, if the party of each part was occasionally wittily pungent in her comments on the other, everybody laughed and nobody had time to criticize. A man who had had much to bestow and who preferred in youth to bestow it upon himself was not infrequently more in the mood for the sharing of marriage when years had revealed to him the distressing fact that he was not, and had never been, the centre of the universe, which distressing fact is one so unfairly concealed from youth in bloom. It was, of course, but as a vaguely outlined vision that these recognitions floated through what could only be alleged to be Feather’s mind because there was no other name for it. The dark little staircase, the rejected and despised third floor, and Coombe detachedly announcing his plans for the house, had set the—so to speak—rather malarious mist flowing around her. A trying thing was that it did not really dispel itself altogether, but continued to hang about the atmosphere surrounding other and more cheerful things. Almost impalpably it added to the familiar feeling—or lack of feeling—with regard to Robin. She had not at all hated the little thing; it had merely been quite true that, in an inactive way, she had not _liked_ her. In the folds of the vague mist quietly floated the truth that she now liked her less.