there would be no mistake about it, the family-provided trousseau was added to; it was also subtracted from, for the simplicity that was her taste and distinction was hateful in his sight.  When she looked “common” in a cotton gown, she lowered his dignity in the world and amongst his professional fellows—­supposed to be so envious of it, in spite of her red face.  Deb had had to suffer the shock of seeing her sister in silk of a morning more than once, and it had been reported to her—­though she did not believe it—­that Mary wore a jewelled necklace to church on Sundays.  Deb did not go to Bennet’s church, which was, fortunately, a long way from her suburban-villa home.

And she had been to his Melbourne house but twice.  On her first visit she had penetrated to Mary’s room, and been horrified to find the husband’s clothes hung up in it from her door-pegs, and his razors and brushes mixed up with her things on her dressing-table.  The arrangement in the country parsonage was to be accounted for; to find it here, made deliberately and of malice prepense, was to see what gulfs now yawned between Mary’s old life and the new one.  Deb reached forth for a comb, and drew back her hand as if she had inadvertently touched a snake.  Mary’s red face went purple as she explained that there was not space in that house for a dressing-room.  There was space enough going to waste in the drawing-room, where Deb had her feelings hurt on her second visit.  It was a very large room, sharing the front of the house with a large study; and behind them all the other rooms huddled as of no account, none of them bigger than Keziah’s Redford storeroom.  The study was sacred to the master of the house; the drawing-room to “company”.  One look showed Deb that Mary never sat there, and that it was not she who had chosen and arranged the furniture.  The foundation of the scheme was a costly “suite”, upholstered in palish silk brocade, the separate pieces standing at fixed intervals apart on a gorgeous Axminster carpet.  When Deb entered the room, Mr Goldsworthy was bending over the central sofa, excited and talking loudly.  Miss Goldsworthy and Mary stood by, mute and drooping; Ruby looked on irresponsibly, with joy in her eye.

“What’s the matter?” inquired Deb, advancing.

As she was not a great lady then, but quite the contrary, Mr Goldsworthy explained what was the matter, with scarcely any modification of his minatory air.  A caller had called yesterday, bringing with her a little boy.  Mary had thoughtlessly fed the little boy with soft cake, and the little boy had first made his hands sticky with it, and then pawed the sofa, which had cost him (B.G.) nearly twenty pounds (part of Mary’s 500 pounds).  Greasy marks had been left on that lovely brocade, for which he (not she) had given thirty-five shillings a yard, and which he had forbidden children to be allowed to sit on.  As if that were not bad enough, “they”—­i.e., those two poor women—­had, without telling