metropolis.  Yes, that’s the word—­we’re becoming a metropolis.  If you don’t believe me, just watch as we go up Franklin Street to Monument Avenue.  I suppose you thought of us still as a poor folksy little Southern city, with a lot of ground going to waste in gardens and green stuff.  Well, you just wait till you see Monument Avenue.  It’s the handsomest boulevard south of Washington.  It’s all new, every brick of it.  There’s not a house the whole way up that isn’t as fresh as paint, and the avenue is just as straight as if you’d drawn it with a ruler—­”

But the change in the city, Gabriella reflected while she embraced Jane, was as nothing compared to the incredible change in Charley himself.  Middle-age had passed over him like some fattening and solidifying process.  He was healthy, he was corpulent, he was prosperous, conventional, and commonplace.  If Gabriella had been seeking, with Hogarthian humour, to portray the evils of torpid and self-satisfied respectability, she could scarcely have found a better picture of the condition than Charley presented.  And the more Charley expanded, the more bloodless and wan Jane appeared at his side.  Her small, flat face with its yellowish and unhealthy tinge, its light melancholy eyes, and its look of lifeless and inhuman sanctification, exhaled the dried fragrance of a pressed flower.  So disheartening was her appearance to Gabriella that it was a relief to turn from her to the freshness of Margaret, handsome, athletic, with cheeks like roses and the natural grace of a young animal.

“Oh, Aunt Gabriella, I hadn’t any idea you were like this!” cried the girl with naïve enthusiasm.

“You thought of me as gray-haired and wearing a bonnet and mantle?”

“No, not that, but I didn’t dream you were so handsome.  I thought mother was the beauty of the family.  But what a wonderful dress you have on!  Are they wearing all those flounces around the hips?”

“There is no doubt about it, you are getting a lot better looking as you grow older,” observed Charley, with genial pleasantry.

“She keeps herself up.  There is a great deal in that,” remarked Jane, and the speech was so characteristic of her that Gabriella tossed back gaily: 

“Well, I’m not old, you know.  I am only thirty-eight.”

“She married so young,” said Mrs. Carr mournfully.  “I hope none of your girls will marry young, Jane.  Gabriella must be a warning to them and to clear little Fanny.”

“But you married young, mother, and so did I,” replied Jane, a trifle tartly.

For some incommunicable reason Jane’s sweetness had become decidedly prickly.  Charley’s reformation had left her with the hurt and incredulous air of a missionary whose heathen have been converted under his eyes by a rival denomination:  and obeying an entirely natural impulse, she appeared ever so slightly, and in the most refined manner possible to revenge herself on the other members of her family.