Silenced, if not convinced, Mr. Hastings walked away, wondering if every husband, at the expiration of fifteen months, reached the enviable position of being "only Howard!" Half an hour later, and Ella Hastings, having left orders with Mrs. Leah for a "company dinner," was riding down the shaded avenue into the highway, where she bade the coachman drive in the direction of Locust Grove.
CHAPTER VII.
THE VISIT.
The plain though comfortable breakfast of dry toast, baked potatoes and black tea was over. This morning it had been eaten from the kitchen table; for, as Mr. Hastings had surmised, it was washing day, and on such occasions, wishing to save work, Mrs. Deane would not suffer the dining-room to be occupied. To this arrangement the proud Eugenia submitted the more readily, as she knew that at this hour they were not liable to calls; so she who had talked of her waiting-maid and wealthy uncle to Mrs. Hastings, sat down to breakfast with her waiting-maid eating her potatoes with a knife and cooling her tea in her saucer; two points which in the parlor she loudly denounced as positive marks of ill breeding, but which in the kitchen, where there was no one to see her, she found vastly convenient! Piles of soiled clothes were scattered over the floor, and from a tub standing near, a volume of steam was rising, almost hiding from view the form of Dora Deane, whose round red arms were diving into the suds, while she to herself was softly repeating the lesson in History, that day to be recited by her class, and which she had learned the Saturday night previous, well knowing that Monday's duties would keep her from school the entire day.
In the chamber above—her long, straight hair plaited up in braids, so as to give it the wavy appearance she had so much admired in Mrs. Hastings—her head enveloped in a black silk apron and her hands incased in buckskin gloves, was Eugenia, setting her room to rights, and complaining with every breath of her hard lot, in being thus obliged to exert herself on hot summer mornings.
"Don't you wish yon were rich as Mrs. Hastings?" asked Alice, who chanced to come in.
"That I do," returned Eugenia. "I have been uncomfortable and discontented ever since I called upon her, for I can't see why there should be such a difference. She has all the money, servants and dresses which she wants, besides the handsomest and most elegant man for a husband; while I, Eugenia Deane, who am ten times smarter than she, and could appreciate these things so much better, am obliged to make all sorts of shifts, just to keep up appearances. But didn't I impress her with a sense of my greatness!" she added, after a pause, and Alice rejoined, "Particularly when you talked of your waiting-maid! I don't see, Eugenia, how you dare do such things, for of course Mrs. Hastings will eventually know that you mean Dora."
"I'm not so sure of that," returned Eugenia; "and even if she does, I fancy I have tact enough to smooth it over with her, for she is not very deep."
For a moment Alice regarded her sister intently, and then said, "I wonder from whom you take your character for deception."
"I've dwelt upon that subject many a time myself," answered Eugenia, "and I have at last come to the conclusion that as father was not famous for sense of any kind, I must be a second and revised edition of mother—but hark, don't you hear the roll of wheels?" And springing up, she reached the window just as Mrs. Hastings alighted from her carriage which stood before the gate.