"I quite agree with Minerva!" announced the leader. "Isabel ought to have a chaperon. I don't doubt she's all she should be or _I_ shouldn't be here to-night, friend of her mother's or not; but I suggested to her only yesterday--I had a little talk with her on Main Street--that she get some respectable old maid or widow to live with her." "What did she say?" asked Mrs. Colton, with a smile. "Say? The insolent young minx! She just looked at me, through me--Me--as if I had not spoken. Her mother always put on airs. That's where she gets it from. I had half a mind not to come to-night. But I wanted to see things for myself. If she does anything really imprudent, _I'll make her suffer_." This last phrase was famous in Rosewater. Mrs. Wheaton employed it seldom, but when she did her friends understood that she was not far from the war-path. Her color had risen with the memory of yesterday's grievance, pushed aside by curiosity for some twenty-eight hours. Mrs. Haight regarded the radiant young hostess with a malignant stare, prudently veiled by drooping lids. She envied Isabel with her whole small soul; she had never known the sensation of liberty in her life, and she stopped short of the courage that might snatch it. Mr. Haight, the leading druggist of Rosewater and an eminent and useful citizen, was a large stolid elderly man--he was at present in the little dining-room with other gentlemen of his standing and a punch-bowl--as regular as a clock in his habits, and devoted conscientiously to his wife, whom he took for a buggy ride every Sunday in fine weather. They had been married for twenty-two years, and for at least fifteen she had yearned to be the heroine of an illicit romance; nor ever yet had found the courage to indulge in a mild flirtation. She really loved her husband, and in many respects made him an excellent wife, but her depths were choked with the slime of a morbid eroticism which her husband was the last man to exorcise. The earlier fever in her blood had gradually dropped to the greensickness of middle-age, so that she was vaguely repellent to men, particularly the young. This she had the wit to detect, as well as the incontrovertible fact that her youth and her chances were gone. As a natural consequence her repressed but still rebellious passions diffused their poison throughout her nature. There were times when she was seized with a frantic desire to inflict injury upon some other woman, and at all times she found relief in sharp criticism, in flinging mud at mantles spotless to the casual eye. She passed for being very piquante and clever in a town where so little happened except the turning over of money, and where the conversation alternated between chickens and cards. She was sure that she scented a scandal here, and her very nostrils quivered with anticipation; the while she hated Isabel more bitterly for taking a lover instead of an eternal husband.