The heavy carpets,
the watchful servants, the perpetually reminding tick of
disciplined clocks, the perpetually renewed stack of
cards and invitations on the hall table, the whole chain
of tyrannical trifles binding one hour to the next, and
each member of the household to all the others, made
any less systematised and affluent existence seem unreal
and precarious. But now it was the Welland house,
and the life he was expected to lead in it, that had
become unreal and irrelevant, and the brief scene on
the shore, when he had stood irresolute, halfway down
the bank, was as close to him as the blood in his veins.
All night he lay awake in the big chintz bedroom at
May's side, watching the moonlight slant along the
carpet, and thinking of Ellen Olenska driving home
across the gleaming beaches behind Beaufort's trotters.
XXII.
A party for the Blenkers--the Blenkers?"
Mr. Welland laid down his knife and fork and
looked anxiously and incredulously across the luncheon-
table at his wife, who, adjusting her gold eye-glasses,
read aloud, in the tone of high comedy: "Professor and
Mrs. Emerson Sillerton request the pleasure of Mr. and
Mrs. Welland's company at the meeting of the Wednesday
Afternoon Club on August 25th at 3 o'clock
punctually. To meet Mrs. and the Misses Blenker.
"Red Gables, Catherine Street. R. S. V. P."
"Good gracious--" Mr. Welland gasped, as if a second
reading had been necessary to bring the monstrous
absurdity of the thing home to him.
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