Eliza Marshall planted her standard upon her breastwork, and flaunted it with a firm and magnificent spirit.
"My daughter Rosamund will be with us inside of a week. She has been detained longer than she had expected among her husband's family." The old lady rose with a stiff, slow motion, and transferred a large panel photograph from the centre-table to Statira Belden's hands. "This reached us yesterday."
It was Rosamund. Her proud and splendid young beauty was set off by a court-train, an immense bouquet, and a nodding group of ostrich-tips.
"Presented at court!" exclaimed Statira Belden, involuntarily, and bit her tongue a second after.
Eliza Marshall answered neither yes nor no. She let the photograph speak for itself.
"Rosamund," she went on, presently, "may return a little too late for her first reception, but the others will be held here, and she will entertain a great deal during the winter."
Statira Belden was cowed at last, and Eliza Marshall's heart beat high to see it. This was her only compensation for the tears shed over the delayed return of a selfish and unfilial daughter, for the anticipated ordeal of the gay social happenings which were to follow that return, for the besetting thought that some dread misfortune might displace all this future festivity by a worse alternative, and make the lightest diversion a black impossibility.
"She kissed the Queen's hand?" palpitated Statira Belden with an interest that she could not stifle; and again Eliza Marshall answered neither yes nor no.
Rosamund had not kissed the Queen's hand, but her husband's family had been so fascinated by her beauty, so amazed by her genius for dress, and so confounded by her boundless aplomb, that one of them had suggested that she attire herself in a costume which had served a daughter of the house at a Drawing-room some six months before, and others had demanded that she be photographed in it. This was the pleasantest impression that Rosy brought back of her husband's family—their generous and unbounded appreciation of herself.
Her other impressions were less acute. Boxton Park itself she had found comfortable, but not at all splendid; and as for its occupants, they were, in the main, staid and serious people who were doing what they could to justify the favors that fortune had bestowed upon them. Rosy sometimes felt that, in general terms, they might have appreciated Jane quite as fully as they had appreciated her. They were not gay, they were not lively, they were not like Arthur. Paston had truly described himself as the youngest, and he was by far the most jovial and blithesome.