They
grew very stiff and ceremonious,--that is, the Rodney ladies did. It was
their prerogative, of course: were they not cousins of the diseased?
Four or five days of uneasy pretence passed with a swiftness that
irritated certain members of the party and a slowness that distressed
the others. Days never were so short as those which the now recklessly
infatuated Brock was spending. He was valiantly earning his way into the
heart of Constance,--a process that tried his patience exceedingly, for
she was blithely unimpressionable, if one were to judge by the calmness
with which she fended off the inevitable though tardy assault. She kept
him at arm's length; appearances demanded a discreetness, no matter how
she may secretly have felt toward the good-looking husband of her
sister. To say that she was enjoying herself would be putting it much
too tamely; she was revelling in the fun of the thing. It mattered
little to her that people--her own cousins in particular--were looking
upon her with cold and critical eyes; she knew, down in her heart, that
she could throw a bomb among them at any time by the mere utterance of a
single word. It mattered as little that Edith was beginning to chafe
miserably under the strain of waiting and deception; the novelty had
worn off for the wife of Roxbury; she was despairingly in love, and she
was pining for the day to come when she could laugh again with real
instead of simulated joyousness.
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