Parliament, and what glory that was to Vassie.

Poor Vassie! What, after all, was her ambition but to attain what should
have come to her by right as daughter of the Squire of Cloom? She had
had to make it the end of her desires, for it she had had to appear what
she was not--what she ought to have been without any striving. If Mr.
Flynn were a man to whom Vassie's beauty outweighed her defects, and if
it were nothing but that with him, then was the outlook for her ultimate
happiness poor; but she was her own mistress and had to be judge of
that. At least she had not deceived him, for there came a postscript to
the rather worldly raptures. "P.S.--He knows about it all, and says it
does not matter; what he wants is me."

After Ishmael, the person most affected by the news, both in herself and
her prospects, would be Phoebe. Ishmael put the letter in his pocket,
though he guessed she too would have had one, and went over to
Vellan-Clowse, Wanda at his heels.

As he went the realisation of how this would affect him grew upon him;
losing Vassie, his life at Cloom would not only be lonely, but, without
her resolute insistence on the niceties, might all too easily slip into
some such slough of boorishness as had overtaken it in his father's day.
If Blanche had only been different, if she had been the Blanche he once
thought her, how sweetly would the whole problem--of loneliness and a
standard of decency and of this tormenting thing that pricked at
him--have been solved. Even the removal of his mother, though a relief,
added to the sense of total disruption which weighed on him. Cloom, the
old Cloom that had been so jolly in spite of everything, the Cloom of
the first three contested, arduous years, then the delightful Cloom
glorified by that summer of Blanche and Killigrew and Vassie and little