Elizabeth became suddenly shy and nervous as she followed her sister up the broad steps and saw the rooms crowded with fashionably dressed people. She was not generally conscious of her clothes, but she could not help feeling, as she glanced over the sea of bonnets and hats and white kid gloves, that her muslin dress and blue ribbons must look very shabby indeed. And somehow Annie had become transformed. Upon starting out she had appeared to be the very pattern of fashionable elegance. Now she looked like a demure little gray nun. Elizabeth felt that neither of them was likely to make any impression upon Mrs. Jarvis, and began to hope devoutly that she would not meet the lady.
There seemed little fear of it. The rooms were crowded and stifling hot. The Raymond house had plenty of doors and windows, but good form in Cheemaun society demanded that all light and air be excluded from a fashionable function. So the blinds were drawn close, and Estella and her mother stood broiling beneath the gas-lamps, for though the former was half-suffocated with the heat, she would have entirely suffocated with mortification had she received her guests in the vulgar light of day.
By the time Elizabeth and her sister arrived, the sheep had been thoroughly divided from the goats. From the drawing-room on the left side of the spacious hall a babel and scream of voices mingled with the noisy notes of a piano poured forth, but in the library on the right there was a deathly silence, except for the click, click of the cards on the polished tables.
The guests were met at the door by an exceedingly haughty young woman with a discontented face beneath a huge pompadour of hair. "Will you come upstairs and lay off your wraps?" she demanded frigidly.
"Why, Katie!" cried Elizabeth, recognizing her old schoolmate, even in her unaccustomed garb of a black silk gown and white cap, "I'm so glad to see you."
But Miss Price was not going to forgive Lizzie Gordon for being a guest at a house where she was a servant. Had their positions been reversed Katie would have been quite as haughty and forbidding as she was now. "How d'ye-do," she said, with an air her young mistress, now setting her foot upon the social ladder, might well have envied. "You're to go upstairs," she commanded further.
"But we haven't anything to take off," protested Mrs. John Coulson, nervously, afraid she was omitting some requisite part of the ceremony. "We'd better not if Mrs. Raymond doesn't mind."
The young woman relaxed none of her haughtiness. "She said to take everybody up," she remarked disdainfully.
They were interrupted by a very large Hat coming violently out of the library door.
"Goodness, it's not her!" gasped the occupant of the hat, a tiny woman with a brisk, sharp manner. She turned to the room again. "No luck! It's Mrs. Coulson." She spoke as if Mrs. Coulson had made a mistake in coming. "You didn't see that Mrs. Oliver on your way down, did you?" she demanded of the unwelcome one.