The sense of it was so rejuvenating that she was almost sure she was looking her best (and with less help than usual from Aline) when she went down to dinner to meet the clan. Enid Drover’s appearance gave a momentary check to her illusion: Enid, after eighteen years, seemed alarmingly the same--pursed-up lips, pure vocabulary and all. She had even kept, to an astonishing degree, the physical air of her always middle-aged youth, the smooth complexion, symmetrically-waved hair and empty eyes that made her plump small-nosed face like a statue’s. Yet the mere fact of her daughter Lilla profoundly altered her--the fact that she could sit beaming maternally across the table at that impudent stripped version of herself, with dyed hair, dyed lashes, drugged eyes and unintelligible dialect. And her husband, Hendrik Drover--the typical old New Yorker--that he too should accept this outlawed daughter, laugh at her slang, and greet her belated entrance with the remark: “Top-notch get-up tonight, Lil!” “Oh, Lilla’s going on,” laughed Mrs. Joe Tresselton, slipping her thin brown arm through her cousin’s heavy white one. Lilla laughed indolently. “Ain’t _you_?” “No--I mean to stay and bore Aunt Kate till the small hours, if she’ll let me.” _Aunt Kate!_ How sweet it sounded, in that endearing young voice! No wonder Anne had spoken as she did of Nollie. Whatever Mrs. Joe Tresselton’s past had been, it had left on her no traces like those which had smirched and deadened Lilla. Kate smiled back at Nollie and loved her. She was prepared to love Joe Tresselton too, if only for having brought this live thing into the family. Personally, Joe didn’t at first offer many points of contact: he was so hopelessly like his cousin Alan Drover, and like all the young American officers Kate had seen on leave on the Riviera, and all the young men who showed off collars or fountain-pens or golf-clubs in the backs of American magazines. But then Kate had been away so long that, as yet, the few people she had seen were always on the point of being merged into a collective American Face. She wondered if Anne would marry an American Face, and hoped, before that, to learn to differentiate them; meanwhile, she would begin by practising on Joe, who, seating himself beside her with the collective smile, seemed about to remark: “See that Arrow?” Instead he said: “Anne’s great, isn’t she, Aunt Kate?” and thereby acquired an immediate individuality for Anne’s mother.