“Missis is in!” Rich Mrs. Penton felt a momentary thrill. It was as if she had been hearing herself spoken of in unimaginable circumstances. She paused a little with a sense of unwillingness to go further. She had met on various occasions the insignificant pretty young woman who was poor Edward’s wife. She had made an effort to be kind to her when they were first married, when the poor Pentons were still more or less in one’s own sphere. But there had been nothing to interest her, nothing to make up for the trouble of maintaining so uncomfortable a relationship, and since that period she had not taken any notice of her cousin’s wife, a woman always immured in nursing cares, having babes or nourishing them, or deep in some one of those semi-animal (as she said) offices which disgust a fastidious woman, who in her own person has nothing of the kind to do. A woman without children becomes often very fastidious on this point. Perhaps the disgust may be partly born of envy, but at all events it exists and is strong. Mrs. Penton hesitated as to whether she would turn back and not go in at all, or whether she would wait at the door till Edward came in, or ask to be shown into his particular sitting-room to wait for him: but that, she reflected, would be a visible slight to Edward’s wife. The unexpressed unformulated dread of what Russell might say restrained her here. He would not criticise, but he would laugh, which was much worse. He would perhaps give vent to a certain small whistle which she knew very well, when she acknowledged that she had been to Penton Hook without seeing the mistress of the house. She did not at all confess to herself that she was a coward, but as a matter of fact rich Mrs. Penton was more afraid of that whistle than poor Mrs. Penton was of anything, except scarlatina. Alicia hesitated; she sat still in her carriage for the space of a minute, while simple Martha gazed as if she had been a queen, and admired the deep fur on the lady’s velvet mantle, and the bonnet which had come from Paris. Then Mrs. Penton made up her mind. “Perhaps your mistress will see me,” she said; “I should like to wait till Mr. Penton comes in.”
“Oh, yes, my lady,” Martha said. Though she had been carefully instructed how to answer visitors, she felt instinctively that this visitor could not be asked her name as if she was an ordinary lady making a call. She then opened the drawing-room very wide and said, “Please, ma’am!” then stopped and let the great lady go in.