Bloom does actually come upon these mothers; it is a visible thing; and they run like girls, walk like athletes, laugh like sycophants.

Yet they give up their sons to the daughters of other mothers, and find it proud rapture enough to be allowed to sit and watch.
Thus Isabel watched George and Lucy dancing, as together they danced away the holidays of that year into the past.
"They seem to get along better than they did at first, those two children," Fanny Minafer said sitting beside her at the Sharons' dance, a week after the Assembly.

"They seemed to be always having little quarrels of some sort, at first.

At least George did: he seemed to be continually pecking at that lovely, dainty, little Lucy, and being cross with her over nothing." "Pecking ?" Isabel laughed.

"What a word to use about Georgie! I think I never knew a more angelically amiable disposition in my life!" Miss Fanny echoed her sister-in-law's laugh, but it was a rueful echo, and not sweet.