“You are what your mother once promised to be,” he said.  To her he gave that mother’s portrait, taking it solemnly from his breast-pocket, and attentively contemplating it before it left his hands.  The ladies pressed him for a thousand details of their mama’s youthful life; they found it a strange consolation to talk of her and image her like Cornelia.  The foreign halo about the Colonel had an effect on them that was almost like what nobility produces; and by degrees they heated their minds to conceive that they were consenting to an outrage on that mother’s memory, in countenancing Mrs. Chump’s transparent ambition to take her place, as they did by staying in the house with the woman.  The colonel’s few expressive glances at Mrs. Chump, and Mrs. Chump’s behaviour before the colonel, touched them with intense distaste for their present surly aspect of life.  Civilized little people are moved to fulfil their destinies and to write their histories as much by distaste as by appetite.  This fresh sentimental emotion, which led them to glorify their mother’s image in their hearts, heightened and gave an acid edge to their distaste for the think they saw.  Nor was it wonderful that Cornelia, said to be so like that mother, should think herself bound to accept the office of taking the initiative in a practical protest against the desecration of the name her mother had borne.  At times, I see that sentiment approaches too near the Holy of earthly Holies for us to laugh at it; it has too much truth in it to be denounced—­nay, if we are not alert and quick of wit, we shall be deceived by it, and wonder in the end, as the fool does, why heaven struck that final blow; concluding that it was but another whimsy of the Gods.  The ladies prayed to their mother.  They were indeed suffering vile torture.  Ethereal eyes might pardon the unconscious jugglery which made their hearts cry out to her that the step they were about to take was to save her children from seeming to acquiesce in a dishonour to her memory.  Some such words Adela’s tongue did not shrink from; and as it is a common habit for us to give to the objects we mentally address just as much brain as is wanted for the occasion, she is not to be held singular.

Colonel Pierson promised to stay a week on his return from Ireland.  “Will that person be here?” he designated Mrs. Chump; who, among other things, had reproached him for fighting with foreign steel and wearing any uniform but the red.

The ladies and Colonel Pierson were soon of one mind in relation to Mrs. Chump.  Certain salient quiet remarks dropped by him were cherished after his departure; they were half-willing to think that he had been directed to come to them, bearer of a message from a heavenly world to urge them to action.  They had need of a spiritual exaltation, to relieve them from the palpable depression caused by the weight of Mrs. Chump.  They encouraged one another with exclamations on the oddness of a visit from their mother’s brother, at such a time of tribulation, indecision, and general darkness.