“Coming down to a nobody like that!” Lena retorted in scorn. “But I think she has been going off in her looks lately, and I dare say she knows it, and is glad to get even him.”
The billiard room was empty, and Dick went in and shut the door.
CHAPTER XIX
ORIENTAL RUBIES
As the months drifted into summer, young Mrs. Percival often felt very dull. She had not even the excitement of envy left her for, with the engagement of Miss Elton and Mr. Norris, much of her old enmity for Madeline faded. Ellery looked to her like a fate so inferior to her own that she could afford to drop her jealousy; and since Mr. Early and Dick were now wholly released from thrall, she considered Madeline a creature too inoffensive to be reckoned an enemy. She could even share the tolerant and amused pleasure with which the world surveys a love match. This pair was so evidently and rapturously content that they diffused their own atmosphere. Lena could not understand that variety of love, but its presence was patent to her.
Most of the “real people” as Mrs. Appleton called them, in improvement on their Maker’s classification, were leaving town either for the lake or for some more distant breathing place, but she was tied at home, first because Mrs. Percival the elder, whom Dick refused to desert, preferred the wide quiet of her rooms, and second because Dick himself grew daily more absorbed in his political labors.
Lena went to say good-by for the summer to Mrs. Appleton and was bidden to come up stairs to a disordered little room where that matron superintended a flushed maid busy with packing.
“I am really quite played out with all this turmoil,” Mrs. Appleton sighed. “Truly, dear Mrs. Percival, I think you are to be congratulated on staying at home. The game is not worth the candle.”