The real Celia, when she came, fairly took Mrs. Madden’s breath away.  The peevish little plans for annoyance and tyranny, the resolutions born of ignorant and jealous egotism, found themselves swept out of sight by the very first swirl of Celia’s dress-train, when she came down from her room robed in peacock blue.  The step-mother could only stare.

Now, after two years of it, Mrs. Madden still viewed her step-daughter with round-eyed uncertainty, not unmixed with wrathful fear.  She still drove about behind two magnificent horses; the new house had become almost tiresome by familiarity; her pre-eminence in the interested minds of the Dearborn County Medical Society was as towering as ever, but somehow it was all different.  There was a note of unreality nowadays in Mrs. Donnelly’s professions of wonder at her bearing up under her multiplied maladies; there was almost a leer of mockery in the sympathetic smirk with which the Misses Mangan listened to her symptoms.  Even the doctors, though they kept their faces turned toward her, obviously did not pay much attention; the people in the street seemed no longer to look at her and her equipage at all.  Worst of all, something of the meaning of this managed to penetrate her own mind.  She caught now and again a dim glimpse of herself as others must have been seeing her for years—­as a stupid, ugly, boastful, and bad-tempered old nuisance.  And it was always as if she saw this in a mirror held up by Celia.

Of open discord there had been next to none.  Celia would not permit it, and showed this so clearly from the start that there was scarcely need for her saying it.  It seemed hardly necessary for her to put into words any of her desires, for that matter.  All existing arrangements in the Madden household seemed to shrink automatically and make room for her, whichever way she walked.  A whole quarter of the unfinished house set itself apart for her.  Partitions altered themselves; door-ways moved across to opposite sides; a recess opened itself, tall and deep, for it knew not what statue—­simply because, it seemed, the Lady Celia willed it so.

When the family moved into this mansion, it was with a consciousness that the only one who really belonged there was Celia.  She alone could behave like one perfectly at home.  It seemed entirely natural to the others that she should do just what she liked, shut them off from her portion of the house, take her meals there if she felt disposed, and keep such hours as pleased her instant whim.  If she awakened them at midnight by her piano, or deferred her breakfast to the late afternoon, they felt that it must be all right, since Celia did it.  She had one room furnished with only divans and huge, soft cushions, its walls covered with large copies of statuary not too strictly clothed, which she would suffer no one, not even the servants, to enter.  Michael fancied sometimes, when he passed the draped entrance to this sacred chamber, that the portiere smelt of tobacco, but he would not have spoken of it, even had he been sure.  Old Jeremiah, whose established habit it was to audit minutely the expenses of his household, covered over round sums to Celia’s separate banking account, upon the mere playful hint of her holding her check-book up, without a dream of questioning her.