She really had for Lillie a great deal of that kind of artistic admiration which nice young girls sometimes have for very beautiful women older than themselves; and was, like almost every one else, somewhat bejuggled and taken in by that air of infantine sweetness and simplicity which had survived all the hot glitter of her life, as if a rose, fresh with dew, should lie unwilted in the mouth of a furnace.

Moreover, Lillie’s face had a beauty this winter it had never worn:  the softness of a real feeling, the pathos of real suffering, at times touched her face with something that was always wanting in it before.  The bitter waters of sin that she would drink gave a strange feverish color to her cheek; and the poisoned perfume she would inhale gave a strange new brightness to her eyes.

Rose sometimes looked on her and wondered; so innocent and healthy and light-hearted in herself, she could not even dream of what was passing.  She had been brought up to love John as a brother, and opened her heart at once to his wife with a sweet and loyal faithfulness.  When she told Mrs. Van Astrachan that Mrs. John Seymour was one of her friends from Springdale, married into a family with which she had grown up with great intimacy, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to the good lady that Rose should want to visit her; that she should drive with her, and call on her, and receive her at their house; and with her of course must come Mrs. Follingsbee.

Mr. Van Astrachan made a dead halt at the idea of Dick Follingsbee.  He never would receive that man under his roof, he said, and he never would enter his house; and when Mr. Van Astrachan once said a thing of this kind, as Mr. Hosea Biglow remarks, “a meeting-house wasn’t sotter.”

But then Mrs. Follingsbee’s situation was confidentially stated to Lillie, and by Lillie confidentially stated to Rose, and by Rose to Mrs. Van Astrachan; and it was made to appear how Dick Follingsbee had entirely abandoned his wife, going off in the ways of Balaam the son of Bosor, and all other bad ways mentioned in Scripture, habitually leaving poor Mrs. Follingsbee to entertain company alone, so that he was never seen at her parties, and had nothing to do with her.

“So much the better for them,” remarked Mr. Van Astrachan.

“In that case, my dear, I don’t see that it would do any harm for you to go to Mrs. Follingsbee’s party on Rose’s account.  I never go to parties, as you know; and I certainly should not begin by going there.  But still I see no objection to your taking Rose.”

If Mr. Van Astrachan had seen objections, you never would have caught Mrs. Van Astrachan going; for she was one of your full-blooded women, who never in her life engaged to do a thing she didn’t mean to do:  and having promised in the marriage service to obey her husband, she obeyed him plumb, with the air of a person who is fulfilling the prophecies; though her chances in this way were very small, as Mr. Van Astrachan generally called her “ma,” and obeyed all her orders with a stolid precision quite edifying to behold.  He took her advice always, and was often heard naively to remark that Mrs. Van Astrachan and he were always of the same opinion,—­an expression happily defining that state in which a man does just what his wife tells him to.