Expiation

I.

"I CAN never," said Mrs. Fetherel, "hear the bell ring without a
shudder."

Her unruffled aspect--she was the kind of woman whose emotions never
communicate themselves to her clothes--and the conventional
background of the New York drawing-room, with its pervading
implication of an imminent tea-tray and of an atmosphere in which
the social functions have become purely reflex, lent to her
declaration a relief not lost on her cousin Mrs. Clinch, who, from
the other side of the fireplace, agreed with a glance at the
clock, that it _was_ the hour for bores.

"Bores!" cried Mrs. Fetherel impatiently. "If I shuddered at _them_,
I should have a chronic ague!"

She leaned forward and laid a sparkling finger on her cousin's
shabby black knee. "I mean the newspaper clippings," she whispered.

Mrs. Clinch returned a glance of intelligence. "They've begun
already?"

"Not yet; but they're sure to now, at any minute, my publisher tells
me."

Mrs. Fetherel's look of apprehension sat oddly on her small
features, which had an air of neat symmetry somehow suggestive of
being set in order every morning by the housemaid. Some one (there
were rumors that it was her cousin) had once said that Paula
Fetherel would have been very pretty if she hadn't looked so like a
moral axiom in a copy-book hand.

Mrs. Clinch received her confidence with a smile. "Well," she said,
"I suppose you were prepared for the consequences of authorship?"

Mrs. Fetherel blushed brightly. "It isn't their coming," she
owned--"it's their coming _now_."

"Now?"

"The Bishop's in town."

Mrs. Clinch leaned back and shaped her lips to a whistle which
deflected in a laugh. "Well!" she said.

"You see!" Mrs. Fetherel triumphed.

"Well--weren't you prepared for the Bishop?"

"Not now--at least, I hadn't thought of his seeing the clippings."

"And why should he see them?"

"Bella--_won't_ you understand? It's John."

"John?"

"Who has taken the most unexpected tone--one might almost say out of
perversity."

"Oh, perversity--" Mrs. Clinch murmured, observing her cousin
between lids wrinkled by amusement. "What tone has John taken?"

Mrs. Fetherel threw out her answer with the desperate gesture of a
woman who lays bare the traces of a marital fist. "The tone of being
proud of my book."

The measure of Mrs. Clinch's enjoyment overflowed in laughter.

"Oh, you may laugh," Mrs. Fetherel