“I just feel as if she was beginning not to care about us at all, Betty,” she said. “I couldn't have believed it of Rosy. She was always such an affectionate girl.”
“I don't believe it now,” replied Betty sharply. “Rosy couldn't grow hateful and stuck up. It's that nasty Nigel I know it is.”
Sir Nigel's intention was that there should be as little intercourse between Fifth Avenue and Stornham Court as was possible. Among other things, he did not intend that a lot of American relations should come tumbling in when they chose to cross the Atlantic. He would not have it, and took discreet steps to prevent any accident of the sort. He wrote to America occasionally himself, and knowing well how to make himself civilly repellent, so subtly chilled his parents-in-law as to discourage in them more than once their half-formed plan of paying a visit to their child in her new home. He opened, read and reclosed all epistles to and from New York, and while Mrs. Vanderpoel was much hurt to find that Rosalie never condescended to make any response to her tentatives concerning her possible visit, Rosalie herself was mystified by the fact that the journey “to Europe” was never spoken of.
“I don't see why they never seem to think of coming over,” she said plaintively one day. “They used to talk so much about it.”
“They?” ejaculated the Dowager Lady Anstruthers. “Whom may you mean?”
“Mother and father and Betty and some of the others.”
Her mother-in-law put up her eye-glasses to stare at her.
“The whole family?” she inquired.
“There are not so many of them,” Rosalie answered.
“A family is always too many to descend upon a young woman when she is married,” observed her ladyship unmovedly. Nigel glanced over the top of his Times.