To Jean, who in dark moments had longed to forget it utterly, the narrow little town recurred with sharp, unlovely lines. Forget it! She could as easily forget that this was her mother. Flout it as she would, it yet stood closer to her than any spot on earth. Its censure and its respect were neither despicable; her rehabilitation in its purblind eyes was a thing desirable above all other ambitions. Then, presently, in this hour when she craved such justification deepest, its possibility, even its certainty, came to her. She had slipped away to answer one of the more imperative letters which Craig's detestation of affairs left to her, and as she mused a moment over her finished task, the drift of Mrs. Fanshaw's monologue in the room beyond penetrated her revery. She was talking, as Jean had heard her talk times innumerable, with endless variations upon a single theme. But the burden of her laud was no longer Amelia! Now it was Jean--her childish spirit, her school-time precocity, her early love of shaping things in clay, her promise, her beauty, her future--Jean, always Jean! And as the girl at the desk drank it in thirstily, she foresaw the end. Signs there had been already that Amelia was wavering on her pedestal--her husband and her husband's family, the proud Fargos, had impaired her sainthood; and now in the tireless, fatuous, sweet refrain, Jean read her own elevation to the vacant niche. Hot tears blinded her. It might not be her noblest compensation; but it was the dearest. If Mrs. Fanshaw's coming marked the dawn of another day in Jean's spirit, its effect on her external welfare was less happy. Her relations with Julie were beyond question altered, though precisely where the difference lay was not easy to detect. Intuition, rather than any overt act or word of Mrs. Van Ostade's, told her this, for their surface intercourse went on much as before; but, elusive and volatile as this changed atmosphere was, she nevertheless knew it for something real, alert, and vaguely hostile. Yet this aloofness, if aloofness it could be called, was so bound up in Julie's propaganda on behalf of Craig's career that Jean took it for a not unnatural jealousy. Atwood fed the flame with repeated acknowledgments of his wife's share in solving his riddle, the fervor of which leaped from bud to bloom with tropic extravagance as the portrait went rapidly forward and the judgment of MacGregor and other experts assured him of its strength. His sister, Jean noted, always took these outbursts in silence. The portrait expressed a Mrs. Joyce-Reeves with whom she was unfamiliar, either over the tea-cups or elsewhere, but she had the breadth to recognize its bigness and set her restless energy to work to exploit it with all her might.