Mr.Tucker Tanner did not appear to claim his damaged love, but the aforementioned Ira George Carter, a penniless never-do-well of the same generation and social standing, offered himself and was accepted.

By the first marriage there had been one child, a girl.

By the second there was another child, a boy.

Ira George Carter, before the children were old enough to impress Mrs.Carter with the importance of their needs or her own affection for them, had squandered, in one ridiculous venture after another, the bulk of the property willed to her by her father, Major Wickham Hedden.

Ultimately, after drunkenness and dissipation on the husband's side, and finally his death, came the approach of poverty.
Mrs.Carter was not practical, and still passionate and inclined to dissipation.