Catherine Murchison succeeded with her sister-women where Betty Steel failed utterly. There was a frankness, an absolute lack of the guile of the Cleopatra, about her that set jealous matrons at their ease. She was so notoriously devoted to her own husband and her home that the respectable flock welcomed her with pleasant bleatings. It was this very popularity of hers that impressed itself on the social pageantries of Roxton. The quick-eyed Betty saw her rival receive the smiles of the feminine community, while she herself was favored with polite distrust. Catherine Murchison was considered orthodox, and to be orthodox is the first proof of gentility among genteel people. Mrs. Steel might be stigmatized as something of a social heretic. And women, being the most outrageous Tories in their heart of hearts, dreaded the fascinating and glib-tongued Socialist who would perhaps reform the marriage laws into free love.
Hence, through all the galaxy of the Roxton garden-parties, Parker Steel’s wife had accumulated many incidental grievances against her rival. Women are sensitive beings, so sensitive that their feelings may be diffused into a smart gown or a Paris hat. The old battle-fire burned in Mrs. Betty’s Circassian eyes. She was amassing her grievances, slowly, surely, and with that curious secretiveness that has often characterized the feminine heart.
“Thomas Baxter, of Boland’s Farm, is dead.”
Parker Steel whisked his serviette over his knees, and looked with a peculiar glint of the eye at his wife in her orange-silk tea-gown.
“Dead, no!”
“Dead as Marley.”
“But they only turned Murchison out yesterday.”
“Exactly. And the dear wife is in the most militant of tempers, the Puritanical old fraud.”
Betty Steel’s olive skin had flushed. She was breathing deeply, and her glance had a significant and inspired glitter.
“Parker.”