Octavius by special train--still prickled in her blood. It was in
all the papers, and the admiration of the flatterers and
"soft-sawdherers"--wives of Irish merchants and smaller professional men
who formed her social circle--was raising visions in her poor head of
going next year with Theodore to Saratoga, and fastening the attention
of the whole fashionable republic upon the variety and resources of her
invalidism. Mrs. Madden's fancy did not run to the length of seeing her
step-daughter also at Saratoga; it pictured her still as the sullen
and hated "red-head," moping defiantly in corners, or courting by
her insolence the punishments which leaped against their leash in the
step-mother's mind to get at her.

The real Celia, when she came, fairly took Mrs. Madden's breath away.
The peevish little plans for annoyance and tyranny, the resolutions born
of ignorant and jealous egotism, found themselves swept out of sight by
the very first swirl of Celia's dress-train, when she came down from her
room robed in peacock blue. The step-mother could only stare.

Now, after two years of it, Mrs. Madden still viewed her step-daughter
with round-eyed uncertainty, not unmixed with wrathful fear. She still
drove about behind two magnificent horses; the new house had become
almost tiresome by familiarity; her pre-eminence in the interested minds
of the Dearborn County Medical Society was as towering as ever, but
somehow it was all different. There was a note of unreality nowadays
in Mrs. Donnelly's professions of wonder at her bearing up under
her multiplied maladies; there was almost a leer of mockery in the
sympathetic smirk with which the Misses Mangan listened to her symptoms.
Even the doctors, though they kept their faces turned toward her,
obviously did not pay much attention; the people in the street seemed no
longer to look at her and her equipage at all. Worst of all, something
of the meaning of this managed to penetrate her own mind. She caught now
and again a dim glimpse of herself as others must have been seeing her
for years--as a stupid, ugly, boastful, and bad-tempered old nuisance.
And it was always as if she saw this in a mirror held up by Celia.

Of open discord there had been next to none. Celia would not permit it,
and showed this so clearly from the start that there was scarcely need
for her saying it. It seemed hardly necessary for her to put into words
any of her desires, for that matter. All existing arrang