"Oh, I won't be a minute, Mrs. Conway," said Pearl, feeling genuinely sorry to have inconvenienced anyone, but not feeling at all guilty as Mrs. Conway wanted her to feel. "Yes, I do hope you'll contrive not to be very long," she said, and could not understand the cause for a dark look her son gave her as he pursued his shivering way upstairs. She went into the sitting room, where her daughter Dorothy was already waiting. It was not a miracle that Dolly was ready on time, but a phenomenon to be explained by the fact that she had a bridge engagement immediately after dinner. She was a pretty, round-faced girl, rather like her mother, except that her hair was still a natural light brown, and her eyes were brown too. She did not raise her head, as her mother entered, from the fashion paper which she was languidly studying. "Not a very promising beginning, is it?" said Mrs. Conway. She knew Dolly would be annoyed and she wished to cut herself off completely from the guilty one. "Do you suppose she's going to keep us waiting for dinner half an hour every evening?" Dolly bent her head to examine a picture of an ermine wrap. "Oh, well, mother," she said, "what can you expect if you give in to every whim of Uncle Anthony's?" Mrs. Conway made a pathetic little grimace--pathetic because it was so obviously intended to win Dolly to her side--to make the girl feel that she and her mother had a secret alliance against the world at large. "You'll find, my dear," she said, "that in dealing with men it's easier to yield at the moment and find a way out at leisure." But Dolly, who had not even looked up long enough to see the grimace, answered with a bitter little laugh, "It may be easier for you, but not for us. We have to suffer. That's the trouble with you, mother--you think of no one in the world but yourself." Her mother did not answer--she could not. Tears rose in her blue eyes. She had enormous capacity for being hurt. Strangely enough, there was something in her that drove those she loved to say exactly the thing that would hurt her most. It had always been so with her husband, and now it was so with her children. A misplaced fortitude always led her to hide the fact that she was hurt. She said now with false gayety, "Well, my dear, I hope some day you will find someone who loves you even better than I do, then." "I'm sure I hope so," said Dolly, turning the page. Her manner suggested that if she could not do that much her life would indeed be a failure.