Monday came. She was at this dinner, this festival for the consummation and celebration of the betrothal of beautiful Laetitia and Laetitia’s darling Harry. That sick dis-ease of hers had wonderfully vanished when she came into the house, when she was hugged fit to crack her to Aunt Belle’s bosom with “Dear child! Dear child! He’s just arrived! He’s with your uncle downstairs. Look at Laetitia! Lovely! Isn’t she lovely? Kiss me again, again, dear child!” When she was floated to by Laetitia, exquisitely arrayed, pink and white, doll-faced, doll-headed, squeaking with coquettish glee, “Rosalie! Darling! Isn’t this awful? Imagine it for me, Rosalie! It oughtn’t to have been planned like this, ought it? Do tell darling mamma it ought not to have been! I’m trembling. Wouldn’t you be?” Yes, gone that sick dis-ease. How at this spectacle suffer dis-ease, or any other disturbance of the emotions save only disgust, contempt at such a horrid preparation for such a horrid rite. Excited responsiveness to their most friendly excitation was not needed in her for it was not expected. “The shy, quiet thing you always are, dear child,” Aunt Belle often used to say to her and said now. (And within the week was to beat her breast in that same drawing-room and cry with an exceeding bitter cry, “Shy! We thought her shy! Sly! Sly! Sly to the tips of her fingers, the wicked girl!”) So she need respond with no more than her normal quiet smile, her normal tone, in their presence, of poor-relation deference and awe. So behind that mask could curl her lip and shudder in the refinements of her views at this most horrid preparation for this most horrid rite. And did. That dis-ease strangely fled, there came to her the swift belief that here, and she had not known it!--was that dis-ease’s cause. It was the anticipation of this exhibition of all the things she hated most, of the most glaring presentiment of outrage of all her strongest principles. This Laetitia, embodiment of useless woman-hood, launching herself on that disgusting dependence on a man that soon would strand her among the derelicts; and that Laetitia’s Harry, that might have been a man among men, coming to the apotheosis of his languishing to--oh, wreathed, fatted calf with gilded horns!