At the present juncture, in the height of the season, it was natural that no one should want a forlorn young girl in deep mourning to make a town visit.

She would have been a killjoy and a wet blanket in any house, that was clear, and nothing could be more thoroughly respectable and proper than that she should spend the first weeks under Madame Bernard's roof and protection.
Some of Angela's friends of her own age came to see her by and by and offered to take her to drive in their mothers' carriages or motor cars, but she would not go, and though she thanked them with grateful words for thinking of her, most of them thought, and told each other, that she had not been very glad to see them and would rather be left alone.

They supposed that she was still too much overcome to wish for their society, and as young people who drop out of the world after being in it a very short time are soon forgotten, they troubled themselves very little about her.

If she ever chose to come out of her solitude, they said, she would be welcome again, but since she wished to be left to herself it was very convenient to humour her, because the Princess Chiaromonte had as good as declared that there were 'excellent reasons' for her own apparently heartless conduct.

No one knew what that meant, but when she spoke in that way it was more blessed to accept her statement than to get her enmity by doubting it.
The Chiaromonte family were at liberty to settle their own affairs as seemed best in their own eyes, and as the law could not interfere, no one else felt inclined to do so.