Grey only laughed.  Some day, she thought, when her father had completed his survey of the coal-formation, and Joseph had induced Congress to stop the war, people would appreciate them.  So she took off Mrs. Sheppard’s furs and bonnet, and smoothed the two black shiny puffs of hair, passing her husband with only a smile, as a stranger was there, but his dressing-gown and slippers waited by the fire.

“Paul may be at home before you,” she said, nodding to them.

Grey had dropped easily through that indefinable change between a young girl and a married woman:  her step was firmer, her smile freer, her head more quietly poised.  Some other change, too, in her look, showed that her affections had grown truer and wider of range than before.  Meaner women’s hearts contract after marriage about their husband and children, like an India-rubber ball thrown into the fire.  Hers would enter into his nature as a widening and strengthening power.  Whatever deficiency there might be in her brain, she would infuse energy into his care for people about him,—­into his sympathy for his patients; in a year or two you might be sure he would think less of Paul Blecker per se, and hate or love fewer men for their opinions than he did before.

The supper, a solid meal always in these houses, was brought in.  Grey took her place with a blush and a little conscious smile, to which Mrs. Sheppard called Doctor Blecker’s attention by a pursing of her lips, and then, tucking her napkin under her chin, prepared to do justice to venison and biscuits.  She sipped her coffee with an approving nod, dear to a young housekeeper’s soul.

“Good!  Grey begins sound, at the foundations, in cooking, Doctor.  No shams, child.  Don’t tolerate them in housekeeping.  If not white sugar, then no cake.  If not silver, then not albata.  So you’re coming with me to New York, my dear?”

Grey’s face flushed.

“Paul says we will go.”

“Sister there?  Teaching, did you say?”

Doctor Blecker’s moustache worked nervously.  Lizzy Gurney was not of his kind; now, more than ever, he would have cut every tie between her and Grey, if he could.  But his wife looked up with a smile.

“She is on the stage,—­Lizzy.  The opera,—­singing;—­in choruses only, now,—­but it will be better soon.”

Mrs. Sheppard let her bit of bread fall, then ate it with a gulp.  Why, every drop of the Shelby blood was clean and respectable; it was not easy to have an emissary of hell, a tawdry actress, brought on the carpet before her, with even this mild flourish of trumpets.

The silence grew painful.  Grey glanced around quickly, then her Welsh blood made her eyelids shake a little, and her lips shut.  But she said gently,—­

“My sister is not albata ware,—­that you hate, Mrs. Sheppard.  She is no sham.  When God said to her, ‘Do this thing,’ she did not ask the neighbors to measure it by their rule of right and wrong.”