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And it was into this Society that Janet was now irrevocably to be plunged! Yes, irrevocably. She could see as she faced them that they had claimed her for their own, that she belonged now utterly to them, not they to her, and that they had no doubt whatever that she was exceedingly fortunate to have been so chosen.

She caught the tone of it exactly from the Duchess. It was her luck that she should know all these people and that they should accept her so swiftly as one of themselves, and she knew now that it had been from the beginning the root of the Duchess's satisfaction, the foreknowledge that she would be so accepted.

One of her deepest impressions was of kindliness. On other casual visits either to Halkin Street or Lady Mossop's or Lady Blanche Chichester's or wherever, she had not been sure of that. She had been outside their world. And in the society of Rosalind's friends she had known that there was no kindliness at all. Camaraderie, perhaps, but always a horror of sentiment, emotion, and above all a preoccupation with self that insisted on freedom at all and every cost.