It was not, altogether; that is, not all the time. We are seldom of a piece, and a part of Celia was chafed, and now and then saddened, by the sense of having brought about anything so unbeautiful as this hate. She could not at all moments clear her conscience of blame, and had pangs of regret--too honest with herself, however, not to know that if all were still to do, she should do the same. For another part of Celia, child of a worldly clan, felt itself eminently justified. One must keep the two worlds distinct in practice: Brethren before our Maker, we yet play the social game according to its rules. After the first, she relegated the matter to a high shelf. She had not made much case of Judith's friendship, she made scarcely more of her enmity. Her life was full of other interests, and, as she mingled less and less with the village, the reminder of Judith's sentiments toward her hardly recurred often enough to constitute an element in her consciousness. The truth is that as Judith dropped out of her existence in the character of one who could interfere with it, she disliked her less. Sometimes the flushed face with its assumed haughtiness, "cutting her dead," (Celia, with some idea, perhaps, of doing for her part a Christian's duty, continued to bow as if unaware of the insult intended her) smote her with a sense of pity at the evil passions hardening that really beautiful face. The Comptons' idea that they might have to give up the village as a summering place was forgotten. When a little chafed by some noisy exhibition of the Brays' vulgarity, Celia used to say to herself hopefully that no doubt Judith would in time marry and go to live elsewhere. She would have been amazed to discover that she was herself directly concerned with Judith's singleness. Judith, the very type of whose charms proclaimed her passionate temperament, had never among her adorers seen one she was sure would have been felt good enough for Celia. There was a story passed along in confidence--how things which the persons concerned in them never breathe come to be generally known is a mystery--that Celia would never marry, because the one she should have married, renounced on account of some deadly habit of a drug, was off somewhere at the other end of the world, fighting his weakness, or, there were those who said, having given up the fight. Judith, hearing this long before, had considered the circumstances with an aching sympathy, mingled with awe. She knew she could never have done it. If she had cared for the man,--the most brilliant man before, and now the most unhappy,--she pictured him handsome as a hero of Byron's,--she would have had to cling to him and go down into the depths together. But spinsterhood had acquired an effect of fineness for her from the study of Celia, with the destruction of her happiness so perfectly concealed that one could detect it by no sign, unless that air of detachment, sometimes, and distance and fatigue, were an expression of it.