new quality in people's looks, a certain hard
exploring curiosity, not untouched with a fleeting and furtive air of
triumph. This look seemed to confront her, with varying degrees of
emphasis, on nearly every face. To her sensitiveness it was as if,
beneath cordial speech, everybody was really saying: "Aha!... So you're
the young lady who hounded that chap into killing himself and got jilted
for your pains. Well, well! Perhaps you won't be quite so
high-and-mighty after this...."

Even Carlisle's most intimate friends, try as they doubtless did, seemed
unable to help showing that they considered her lot in the world sadly
changed. So, indeed, it was. Mattie and Evey could not, for instance,
begin naturally by asking, "Cally, did you have a lovely summer?"--when
of course they knew very well that she had had a perfectly frightful
summer. Mattie came in before eleven o'clock on the first morning,
chirping affectionate greetings; but neither then nor later did she
manage to convey any real sense of sympathy with Cally, or of
understanding what she had been through, or even of wanting to
understand. Cally would have liked to justify herself to Mattie, to talk
her heart out to her, or to somebody; but Mattie's idea was clearly to
keep Cally's mind off it, as you do with the near relatives of the
deceased. And was it possible that even Mats's sweet girlishness showed
a subtle trace of confirmation of the Frenchman's bitter maxim, that in
the misfortunes of our friends there is something not altogether
displeasing to us?...

If with Mats and Evey, so and much more so with others, less genuinely
friendly. Nobody took the responsibility of open condemnation, as by
"cutting" Mrs. B. Thornton Heth or her daughter. On the other hand,
nobody forgot; nobody made allowances; nobody asked a single question.
Judgment was obviously passed, and everybody seemed perfectly clear
about the verdict. The Heths were people to be treated with respect as
long as they kept their money, but between you and me, their social
fortunes had received a stain which would not wear off. Hugo Canning had
had it exactly right. Cally Heth would be pointed at to the longest day
she lived....

Cally, after the first shrinking, was possessed by a sense of
anti-climax. Life had a brassy ring. She had come home with at least
something of her mother's military keenness for the "campaign" of
vindication, but within a day or two she was thinking, rather cynically