"Yes. I am sure you know who he is."
"Oh, I know who he is." Mrs. Poughkeepsie spoke these words with a ruminative yet astonished drawl.
"Well, I am engaged to him," said Pauline, stoutly but not over-assertively. She had never looked more composed, more simply womanly than now.
Mrs. Poughkeepsie rose. It always meant something when this lady rose. It meant a flutter of raiment, a deliberation of readjustment, a kind of superb, massive dislocation.
"I am horrified!" exclaimed the mother of the future Countess Glenartney.
Pauline rose, then, with a dry, chill gleam in her eyes. "I think that there is nothing to horrify you," she said.
Mrs. Poughkeepsie gave a kind of sigh that in equine phrase we might call a snort. Her large body visibly trembled. She rapidly drew forth a handkerchief from some receptacle in her ample-flowing costume, and placed it at her lips. Pauline steadily watched her, with hands crossed a little below the waist.
"I do so hope that you are not going to faint, Aunt Cynthia," she said, with a satire that partook of strong belligerence.
Mrs. Poughkeepsie, with her applied handkerchief, did not look at all like fainting as she glanced above the snowy cambric folds toward her niece.
"I—I never faint, Pauline ... it is not my way. I—I know how to bear calamities. But this is quite horrible ... it agitates me accordingly. I—I have nothing to say and yet I—I have a great deal to say."