After that, each according to her nature entertained her aversion. In Celia the act consisted in as perfect an exclusion from her thoughts of the other, now altogether outside the pale of consideration, as her will could compass. She refused to be concerned with such ugliness, or have her life vulgarized by the sentiments which befitted it. In Judith it formed an undercurrent of excitement, never quite below consciousness, and at the root of many an action of hers which from the surface would have seemed to have no relation with it. Other factors in Judith's life there were combining with her sense of Celia's disesteem and her revolt against it and requital of hatred, to give her character a touch of lawlessness in its audacity; her wealth, her power over her father, her ascendency over the imaginations of the plain villagers. It was finally felt that she believed everything permitted to her, and an occasional exaggeration in hard, hare-brained boldness made a beginning of division in opinion about her among those whom her generosity and good-humor had first made all alike her adherents. From time to time inevitably the rivals crossed each other's path, when Celia's superiority was confirmed to her by the cold freedom of mind she could maintain under the test, while Judith's tortures were manifest in the loud fool she made of herself, with the cheap drama of her flashing eye and imperial attitudes. Thus, while weeks grew to months and months to years, under the genial light of day and the beauty of the nights, amid innocent occupations and simple pleasures and natural relations satisfying to the heart, the two carried about, with as little fear as if it had been some such thing as Judith's diminutive pet alligator brought home from the South, or the diamond snake with which Celia fastened her lace, the sentiment destined to find its termination in such tragic horror. II Celia, after a round of visits, had come late this year to their country-house. Miss Greene, called in to make shorter a walking-skirt for country rambles, as she stitched, told the news, according to her wont. She had discovered that she was more acceptable to Celia when she left the Brays out of her conversation, just as she was more acceptable to Judith when she turned it upon the Comptons. As this diminished her immediate store of topics while at the Comptons--village doings were so inwoven with the Brays' affairs--Miss Greene felt obliged to extend the radius which her reports took in. "You ever drive over Quarryville way these days?" After an interval of silence, long for her, she thus started a new subject. "I haven't driven there for a long time. Do you think it a pretty road? I have never cared for it."