Jenny was quite of Peggy’s opinion that she ought to profit by her cousin’s good fortune. But there the thoughts of the kinswomen diverged widely, and ran in two distinct and opposing channels. Jenny Hedderwick was a calculating, unscrupulous young woman, bent on making her own--and that as quickly as might be--out of Peggy’s advantages, and of what Johnnie Fuggie had confidently reckoned, in more senses than one, her relations’ share in them. Johnnie was a forward fool, as obtuse as he was intrusive, but Jenny was worse. She had viewed what was to her Peggy’s utterly unwarrantable exaltation with indignant amazement and disgust, while she had at the same time endeavoured to swallow her jealous vexation, and reap all the benefit she could gain from her cousin’s prosperity without paying any heed to what Peggy might lose in the process. Jenny did not go the length of hating Peggy, or even of bearing her decided ill-will. She was not worth it in Jenny’s estimation. She was a silly ‘coof,’ who, if one lost sight of her fair face, had not a single claim to rise above her old allies, and was as totally unfitted to do so as a girl could be. All the use she was for, in Jenny’s sharp, mocking estimate, was to serve as available prey for those who had spirit and wit to spoil the new-made lady. In accomplishing her object Jenny would not dream of being harsh or cruel to young Mrs. Ramsay. She would be as good to Peggy in a half-jeering, contemptuous manner as the girl would permit. Jenny was too astute a schemer as well as too reasonable a mortal for the opposite course of conduct. Indeed, hers was not a harsh or cruel nature, though she was wholly worldly and in many respects unfeeling. At the same time, Jenny would not take the trouble or undergo the personal mortification of keeping up much of a disguise before Peggy--her own cousin, who had been wont to convoy Jenny and carry her bundle for her in the elder woman’s earlier visits to the Cotton, when Peggy had felt amply rewarded for her trudge and toil by an old riband of Jenny’s or a handful of the ‘sweeties’ which had been her last ‘market fare’--a silly lass, who could not hold up her head in her own house, fill the place she had won, give orders and exact obedience and deference from a laird himself, as Jenny would have done with a high hand in Peggy’s place. But Peggy must ‘pinge’ like a senseless bairn for the poor old mother well out of the way. Who was to stand on ceremony and put herself about to maintain a great show of appearances before such an unmitigated goose? Accordingly, the very day after the setting out of Drumsheugh and his mother, Jenny--a strapping-enough figure, with a foxy head and steely eyes--proceeded to ‘rake’ through the house, up and down, backwards and forwards, opening cupboards and turning out the contents of drawers; taking an inventory, as it were, of what might be useful to her, with an eye to future raids.