She had lived through all that; she and he had faced each other; had exchanged greetings, she supposed; had even, perhaps, said something to each other about Anne, and about their future relation. She did not know what; she judged only, from the undisturbed faces about them, that there had been nothing alarming, nothing to scandalize or grieve; that it had all, to the tribal eye, passed off decently and what they called “suitably”. Her past training had served her--his boundless assurance had served him. It was what the French called “a moment to pass”; they had passed it. And in that mad world beyond the abyss, where she now found herself, here they all were with the old faces, saying the same old things with the same old complacency, eating their way through the same Clephane courses, expressing the same approval of the Clephane cellar (“It was Hendrik, you know, who advised John to lay down that ninety-five Clicquot,” she caught Enid Drover breathing across the bubbles to her son-in-law). It was all, in short, as natural and unnatural, as horrible, intolerable and unescapable, as if she had become young again, with all her desolate and unavoidable life stretching away ahead of her to--this. And, in the mad phantasmagoria, there was Chris himself, symbolizing what she had flown to in her wild escape; representing, in some horrible duality, at once her sin and its harvest, her flight and her return. At the thought, her brain began to spin again, and she saw her own youth embodied before her in Anne, with Anne’s uncompromising scorns and scruples, Anne’s confident forward-looking gaze. “Ah, well,” she heard Hendrik Drover say as they rose from the table, “these occasions will come round from time to time in the best-regulated families, and I suppose we all feel--” while, at the other side of the table, Enid Drover, pink and melting from a last libation, sighed to Horace Maclew: “I only wish dear mother and John could have been here with us!” and Lilla, overhearing her, bracketed the observation in an ironic laugh. It had all gone off wonderfully; thanks to Anne’s tact the meeting between her mother and her betrothed had been thickly swaddled in layer on layer of non-conducting, non-explosive “family”. A sense of mutual congratulation was in the air as the groups formed themselves again in the drawing-room. The girl herself moved from one to another, pale, vigilant, radiant; Chris Fenno, in a distant corner, was settled with coffee-cup and cigarette at Lilla Maclew’s side; Mrs. Clephane found herself barricaded behind Hendrik Drover and one of the older Tresseltons. They were the very two men, she remembered, between whom she had spent her evening after that first family dinner in which this one was so hallucinatingly merged.