She discreetly
renovated the old "homestead," as she called it, and arranged to reside
in eastern Massachusetts through the summer season. She made a few
careful acquaintances among her neighbors, and presently found it
possible to spend a profitable and distinguished winter month in the Back
Bay. One step more brought her to her goal. Social exchange between
Boston and New York being practically at par, she passed from one town to
the other with an unimpaired currency. In Manhattan she was received with
sufficient frequency by people sufficiently distinguished, and
announcements in correspondence with the facts were borne westward by
various metropolitan dailies and weeklies. She herself followed, in due
course; she had now conquered a certain foothold at home, and her
progress there was distinctly perceptible.
The last stronghold of the opposition existed, much to her mortification,
in her own immediate neighborhood, where a stubborn little clique (as she
called it) continued, under the leadership of Susan Bates, to ignore her.
The Belden carriage-block, measuring diagonally across the street, was
three hundred feet from that of the Bateses, but the distance might as
well have been three hundred miles. Mrs. Bates, who, on some occasion or
other, had met her face to face, continued to hold sturdily the
impression that her eyes were at once too furtive and too bold, and that
her hair was too yellow for a woman of her age; "or, for that matter, too
yellow for a woman of _any_ age.
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