But the humiliation of her last encounter with chivalry stuck with profound irritation.  She recalled the scene again and again.  She remembered her contemptuous silence before Stillman’s obvious suavities, the high, assured laugh which his companion, Mrs. Condor, threw out to meet his quiet sallies, the ruffling satisfaction of her mother, chattering on irrelevantly, but with the undisguised purpose of creating a proper impression.  How easily Stillman must have seen through Claire’s muteness and the elder woman’s eager craving for an audience!  And all the time Mrs. Condor had been laughing, not ill-naturedly, but with the irony of an experienced woman possessing a sense of humor.

And at the end, when the four had left the church together, to be whirled home in Stillman’s car, the sudden nods and smiles and farewells that had blossomed along the path of her mother’s exit!  Claire could have laughed it all away if her mother had not betrayed such eagerness to drink this snobbish flattery to the lees....

Claire’s father had never entered very largely into her calculations, but to-night her readjusted vision included him.  Stubborn, kind, a bit weak, and inclined to copying poetry in a red-covered album, he had been no match for the disillusionments of married life.  Her mother’s people had felt a sullen resentment at his downfall—­he had taken to drink and died ingloriously when Claire was still in her seventh year.  Claire, influenced by the family traditions, had shared this resentment.  But now she found herself wondering whether there was not a word or two to be said in his behalf.  Her father had been a cheap clerk in a wholesale house when he had married.  The uncertain Carrol fortunes were waning swiftly at the time, and Emily Carrol had been thrown at him with all the panic that then possessed a public schooled in the fallacy that marriage was a woman’s only career.  The result was to have been expected.  Extravagance, debts, too much family, drink, death—­the sequence was complete.  He had been captured, withered, cast aside, by a tribe that had not even had the decency to grant his memory the kindness of an excuse.

Wide-eyed and restless, Claire Robson felt a sudden pity for her father.  Tears sprang to her eyes; it overwhelmed her to discover this new father so full of human failings and yet so full of human provocation.  In her twenty-four years of life she had never shed a tear for him, or felt the slightest pang for his failure.  If she had ever doubted the Carrol viewpoint, she had never given her lack of faith any scope.  She had taken their cast-off prejudices and threadbare convictions as docilely as she had once received their stale garments.  She had shrunk from spiritual independence with all the obsequious arrogance of a poor relation at a feast.  Her diffidence, her self-consciousness, her timidity, were the outward forms of an inbred snobbery.  It was curious how suddenly all this was made clear to her....