“It is all very well to make light of the whole business, my dear Amber,” she cried plaintively. “Daughters engage themselves to be married, and sometimes get married too, without a thought for their mothers. Ah, is there no poet--no novelist--who will deal adequately with the mother’s tragedy? It will make me look a hundred, at the very least! A married daughter! ... ‘Good heavens!’ people will say. ‘I had no idea that Lady Gwendolen had a married daughter; why then she must be at least’--and then they will name some horrid age--forty, may be,--I know the way of these women. ‘Forty--she must be a good way over forty,’ they will say. ‘She was no chicken when she married, and her daughter looks every day of twenty-six--why, she must be at least fifty’--they will try to make me out to be fifty--fifty-two the spiteful ones will insist on--I know them. They will take very good care never to look up Debrett to get at the truth. Ah, the Mother’s Tragedy--the Mother’s Tragedy. No one ever thinks of asking about a woman’s age until her daughter gets married. Then, it’s the first thing they do. Ah, the Mother’s Tragedy! How well that broad brim suits her, doesn’t it, Joe? You didn’t think, I suppose, of a bow of cerise chiffon just at the curve? A little daring thing like that, you know, is often quite effective.” “I hope you will be happy, my dearest Joe,” said Amber. “I shall be married, at any rate,” said Josephine, “and isn’t that a step in the right direction? Happiness?... Well, could there be anything more ridiculous than an attempt to define happiness? Six months ago I had no hesitation in defining it for my own benefit. I defined it--down to the very man. That was where I was the fool,--for now I have come to think that that which I thought to be happiness is the only unhappiness that exists for me in the world. But I shall face it. I shall face it. When one has been a fool one must pay for it.” “Dear Joe--oh, Joe--Joe! Do not talk so, for God’s sake,” cried Amber. “You began it, my dear Amber,” said Joe, pointing a finger at her, and leaning back among the cushions of her sofa. The attitude was that one of the lovely figures in Andrea’s picture of “The Wedding Feast,” and Amber recognised it with horror. “You began it--you, talking about happiness and the rest of it,” she continued. “Well, there, I’ll say no more.... Heavens, I forgot that I did not see you since we returned from The Weir! And that seems a lifetime ago. Ah, it is true, ‘Marriage and death and division, make barren our lives.’ I wonder why I was such a fool as to go to The Weir with you, Amber.”