"Good-night," said Mrs. Bobby, cheerfully. "Sleep well—you need to—and don't waste another thought on that tiresome creature, Julian."
"Oh, I'm not likely to," Elizabeth responded, with rather a pale smile. "I'm much too tired."
And yet she did think of him more than once, as she stood before her mirror, arranging her hair into two heavy braids, which reached below her waist, and repeating to herself that, as Mrs. Bobby had said, it could matter little about the one dissenting voice in the general chorus of admiration which had attended her triumphant career. In spite of which assurance, her last thoughts as she fell asleep might have been somewhat surprising to those who, having watched that career entirely from the outside, regarded her as the most fortunate being in the world.
Elizabeth's aunts were on the whole, more to be envied than the girl herself that winter. There was no alloy in their happiness, no under-current of dissatisfaction, even though they wore their old black silks, and Miss Joanna's friend, the butcher, was heard to complain somewhat bitterly of her sudden parsimony in regard to joints of meat. What did it matter? They would have dressed cheerfully in sackcloth and lived on bread and water, for the sake of such glowing accounts of Elizabeth's triumphs as Mrs. Bobby constantly transmitted, or of the girl's own brilliant letters which seemed to breathe the radiant satisfaction of a mind without a care.
Elizabeth's aunt at Bassett Mills also watched her career, which was chronicled at that time in the papers. Poor Aunt Rebecca, after a hard day's work, reading her niece's name, and possibly a description of her costume in the list of guests at some smart festivity, would look up, awe-struck, at Amanda. "Only to think," she would say, with the old contradictory note, half pride, half jealousy "to think that it should be Malvina's girl!"
But Amanda, still pale and wasted from the fever with her hair quite long and very soft and wavy, would give an odd, furtive look from her light eyes and say nothing.