CHAPTER IV.
"TO MEET MR. AND MRS. KINGSTON."
RACHEL was away for nearly a year and a half, seeing all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them in the most luxurious modern fashion. It was such a tour as a romantic and imaginative woman born to a humdrum life would feel to be the one thing to "do" and die; and according to her account, she enjoyed it extremely. She came home very much improved by it in the opinion of her aunt and other good judges.
"Certainly," they said, "travel is the very best education: there is nothing like it for enlarging the mind, and for giving polish and repose to the manners."
Mrs. Kingston, indeed, when she took her place in the society of which her husband had long been so distinguished an ornament, was a very interesting study, as exemplifying this soundest of popular theories. She was greatly altered in all sorts of ways. She had quite lost that bashful rusticity which had been Mrs. Hardy's despair, and in her unpretentious fashion, was really very dignified.
There was no hurry and flutter about her now as there used to be; none of that indiscriminate enthusiasm, which in her aunt's eyes branded her as a poor relation who "had never been used to anything nice." She expressed her appreciation of things smilingly and sweetly, with more or less of her natural bright frankness, but with a well-bred moderation and serenity that might have become a duchess. To please her husband she wore rich raiment, "composed" by the most distinguished Parisian artists, and it symbolised the change that all her individuality seemed to have undergone.
She was no longer a girl, an ingénue, a bread-and-butter miss, a pretty little nobody; she was an experienced and cultured woman, a leader of society, fully equipped for that high position, with a just appreciation of her own importance, and relatively to that of other people's.
Indeed, there seemed to certain persons—Miss Brownlow amongst others—indications in her reticent and reposeful manner of a tendency to be exclusive, and to think a great deal too much of herself.
Mrs. Hardy, who was immensely interested in the unforeseen development, was beyond measure gratified by it—more especially as the young wife was evidently on the best of terms with her husband, though she had the good taste to refrain from drawing public attention to the fact.