ely ovation. It must not be supposed that
she continually talked to her friends and neighbours of Lord Dumbello
and the marchioness. She was by far too wise for such folly as that.
The coming alliance having been once announced, the name of Hartletop
was hardly mentioned by her out of her own domestic circle. But she
assumed, with an ease that was surprising even to herself, the airs
and graces of a mighty woman. She went through her work of morning
calls as though it were her business to be affable to the country
gentry. She astonished her sister, the dean's wife, by the simplicity
of her grandeur; and condescended to Mrs. Proudie in a manner which
nearly broke that lady's heart. "I shall be even with her yet," said
Mrs. Proudie to herself, who had contrived to learn various very
deleterious circumstances respecting the Hartletop family since
the news about Lord Dumbello and Griselda had become known to her.
Griselda herself was carried about in the procession, taking but
little part in it of her own, like an Eastern god. She suffered her
mother's caresses and smiled in her mother's face as she listened to
her own praises, but her triumph was apparently within. To no one did
she say much on the subject, and greatly disgusted the old family
housekeeper by declining altogether to discuss the future Dumbello
_menage_. To her aunt, Mrs. Arabin, who strove hard to lead her
into some open-hearted speech as to her future aspirations, she was
perfectly impassive. "Oh, yes, aunt, of course," and "I'll think
about it, Aunt Eleanor," or "Of course I shall do that if Lord
Dumbello wishes it." Nothing beyond this could be got from her; and
so, after half a dozen ineffectual attempts, Mrs. Arabin abandoned
the matter.

But then there arose the subject of clothes--of the wedding
_trousseau_! Sarcastic people are wont to say that the tailor makes
the man. Were I such a one, I might certainly assert that the
milliner makes the bride. As regarding her bridehood, in distinction
either to her girlhood or her wifehood--as being a line of plain
demarcation between those two periods of a woman's life--the milliner
does do much to make her. She would be hardly a bride if the
_trousseau_ were not there. A girl married without some such
appendage would seem to pass into the condition of a wife without any
such line of demarcation. In that moment in which she finds herself
in the first fruition of her marriage finery she becomes a bride; and
i