e returned from her honeymoon--to abandon all
thoughts, pretensions, efforts toward an attractive exterior, and to
become a "settled" woman, "settled" meaning purified of the last grain of
the vanity of trying to please the eye or ear of the male. And
conversation with any man, other than her husband--and even with him, if
a woman were soundly virtuous, through and through--must be as clean
shorn of allurement as a Quaker meetinghouse. Mrs. Fred had defied this
ancient and sacred tradition of the "settled" woman. She had kept her
looks; she frankly delighted in the admiration of men. And the fact that
the most captious old maid in Saint X could not find a flaw in her
character as a faithful wife, aggravated the offending. For, did not her
devotion to her husband make dangerous her example of frivolity retained
and flaunted, as a pure private life in an infidel made his heresies
plausible and insidious? At "almost" forty, Mrs. Hastings looked "about"
thirty and acted as if she were a girl or a widow. Each group of gods
seems ridiculous to those who happen not to believe in it. Saint X's set
of gods of conventionality doubtless seems ridiculous to those who knock
the dust before some other set; but Saint X cannot be blamed for having a
sober face before its own altars, and reserving its jeers and pitying
smiles for deities of conventionality in high dread and awe elsewhere.
And if Mrs. Fred had not been "one of the Fuller heirs," Saint X would
have made her feel its displeasure, instead of merely gossiping and
threatening.

"I'm going the round of the invalids to-day," began Henrietta, after she
had got through the formula of sick-room conversation. "I've just come
from old John Skeffington. I found all the family in the depths. He
fooled 'em again last night."

Hiram smiled. All Saint X knew what it meant for old Skeffington to "fool
'em again." He had been dying for three years. At the first news that he
was seized of a mortal illness his near relations, who had been driven
from him by his temper and his parsimony, gathered under his roof from
far and near, each group hoping to induce him to make a will in its
favor. He lingered on, and so did they--watching each other, trying to
outdo each other in complaisance to the humors of the old miser. And he
got a new grip on life through his pleasure in tyrannizing over them and
in putting them to great expense in keeping up his house. He favored
first one group, then another