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Updated: May 26, 2025
Featherbrain, for Lady Gwendoline, tries to come back, in spite of her, for this unseen Miss Seton. She is an altered woman a better woman, a more unselfish woman, but the old leaven of iniquity is not dead yet. The moments drag on it is drawing near seven. How will Trixy receive her, she wonders. Will she be generous, and forget the past, or will she make her feel it, as her brother has done?
Featherbrain gave a last "At Home," a sort of "P. P. C." party, Trixy called it. Miss Darrell was invited, and said nothing at the time, unless tossing the card of invitation contemptuously out of the window can be called saying something; but at the last moment she declined to go. "My head is whirling now, from a surfeit of parties," she said to Miss Stuart.
"Aunt Chatty is going to stay at home, and so shall I. I don't like your Mrs. Featherbrain that's the truth and I'm not fashionable enough yet to sham friendship with women I hate. Besides, Trix dear, you know you were a little just a little jealous of me, the other night at Roosevelt's. Sir Victor danced with me once oftener than he did with you.
"Little imbecile! Trixy, I should like to see those papers." "So you can I have them. Charley got them from Laura Featherbrain. What could not Charley get from Laura Featherbrain I wonder?" adds Trix, sarcastically. Edith's color rose, her eyes fell on the tatting between her fingers. "Your brother and the lady are old lovers then? So I inferred from her conversation last night."
The chill of the place seemed to wrap him round. He felt as if icy fingers had clutched his heart. It was all a joke of course only a joke! But jokes sometimes ended disastrously, and Toby Toby was not an ordinary person. She was either a featherbrain or a genius. He did not know which. Perhaps there was no very clear dividing line between the two. She was certainly extraordinary.
Charley, looking calm and languid even in the dance, flits past, clasping gay little Mrs. Featherbrain, and gives her a patronizing nod. And Edith's thought is "If this could only go on forever!" But the golden moments of life fly the leaden ones only lag we all know that to our cost. The waltz ends. "A most delicious waltz," says Sir Victor gayly. "I thought dancing bored me I find I like it.
Stuart's flatteries, or the matronly dignity with which Mrs. Featherbrain repels them!" She turns her white shoulder deliberately upon them both, and welcomes Sir Victor with her brightest smile. "And for a rustic lassie, fresh from the fields and the daisies, it isn't so bad," is Mrs. Featherbrain's cool criticism.
If the Stuarts were all dead and buried they could not more completely have dropped out of the lives of their summer-time friends. It must be true, she thinks, what Mrs. Featherbrain told her. Trixy is married and settled somewhere with her mother, and Charley is thousands of miles away, "seeking his fortune." Then, all at once, she resolves to go back to England.
Her eyes glitter maliciously and jealously, even while she laughs. If it is in the shallow heart of this prettily-painted, prettily-powdered woman, to care for any human being, she has cared for Charley Stuart. "Mrs. Featherbrain!" Edith exclaims, in haughty surprise, half rising. "My dear, don't be angry you might do worse, though how, it would be difficult to say.
With Sir Victor, as Trixy explained it, she was "goody" and talked sense. Mr. Stuart went back to the ball, and, I regret to say, made himself obnoxious to old Featherbrain, by the marked empressement of his devotion to old Featherbrain's wife. Edith listened to the narration next day from the lips of Trix with surprise and disgust.
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