The flush of pride in her greatest achievement up to date--having the most celebrated of New York physicians brought up to Octavius by special train--still prickled in her blood.

It was in all the papers, and the admiration of the flatterers and "soft-sawdherers"-- wives of Irish merchants and smaller professional men who formed her social circle--was raising visions in her poor head of going next year with Theodore to Saratoga, and fastening the attention of the whole fashionable republic upon the variety and resources of her invalidism.

Mrs.Madden's fancy did not run to the length of seeing her step-daughter also at Saratoga; it pictured her still as the sullen and hated "red-head," moping defiantly in corners, or courting by her insolence the punishments which leaped against their leash in the step-mother's mind to get at her.
The real Celia, when she came, fairly took Mrs.Madden's breath away.
The peevish little plans for annoyance and tyranny, the resolutions born of ignorant and jealous egotism, found themselves swept out of sight by the very first swirl of Celia's dress-train, when she came down from her room robed in peacock blue.

The step-mother could only stare.
Now, after two years of it, Mrs.Madden still viewed her step-daughter with round-eyed uncertainty, not unmixed with wrathful fear.

She still drove about behind two magnificent horses; the new house had become almost tiresome by familiarity; her pre-eminence in the interested minds of the Dearborn County Medical Society was as towering as ever, but somehow it was all different.