All this the city had been seeing and gossiping over for four months.  All this, with weary detail, was poured into my ears by kind friends.

My sister said no word.  For the first time in my life there was a barrier between us I dared not pass.  Her every allusion to Mrs. Long was in the kindest and most unembarrassed manner.  She fell heartily and graciously into every plan which brought them together:  she not only did this, she also fully reciprocated all entertainments and invitations; it was as often by Ellen’s arrangement as by Mrs. Long’s that an evening or a day was spent by the two families together.  Her manner to Mrs. Long was absolutely unaltered.  Her manner to John was absolutely unaltered.  When during an entire evening he sat almost motionless and often quite speechless, listening to Mrs. Long’s conversation with others, Ellen’s face never changed.  She could not have seemed more unconscious if she had been blind.  There were many bonds of sympathy between John Gray and Emma Long, which had never existed between him and his wife.  They were both passionately fond of art, and had studied it.  Ellen’s taste was undeveloped, and her instinctive likings those of a child.  But she listened with apparent satisfaction and pleasure to long hours of conversation, about statues, pictures, principles of art, of which she was as unable to speak as one of her own babies would have been.  Mrs. Long was also a woman who understood affairs; and one of her great charms to men of mind was the clear, logical, and yet picturesque and piquant way in which she talked of men and events.  Ellen listened and laughed as heartily as any member of the circle at her repartee, her brilliant characterization, her off-hand description.

To John Gray all this was a new revelation.  He had never known this sort of woman.  That a woman could be clever as men are clever, and also be graceful, adorned, and tender with womanliness, he had not supposed.

Ah, poor Emma Long! not all my loyalty to my sister ever quite stifled in my heart the question whether there was not in Mrs. Long’s nature something which John Gray really needed—­something which Ellen, affectionate, wise, upright, womanly woman as she was, could never give to any man.

The winter wore on.  Idle and malicious tongues grew busier and busier.  Nothing except the constant presence of my sister wherever her husband and Mrs. Long were seen together, prevented the scandal from taking the most offensive shape.  But Ellen was so wise, so watchful, that not even the most malignant gossip-monger, could point to anything like a clandestine intercourse between the two.