"You didn't talk downstairs, Cally? No one pumped you as to what had happened?"
Mrs. Heth wielded hatpins before the mirror, the glitter surviving in her eyes.
"I am putting on a hat," she threw out, "to give matters a casual air. A public hotel's a hotbed of gossip. Everything depends on the story's being started right--on just the right note.... Thank God, I'm here!"
"Lie down," added Mrs. Heth, and Carlisle lay down.
The most exhaustive details of the affair had not, perhaps, been laboriously collected as yet, but luckily Mrs. Heth was not the sort that requires a mass of verbose testimony and dull statistics. The right note awaited her touch six floors below, and time was pressing. Already her mind had flown well ahead, perceived with precision just what was required. Willie must be seen, and at least two ladies, of different sets, great gossips, for preference; and to these she would confide, with some little just indignation but without excitement, the astounding truth about the young blackleg who, having boarded and upset her daughter's boat, turned coward and scuttled off, ignoring her frightened cries. Nor would she fail to express her sincere sympathy for Colonel Dalhousie, whose heart (she understood) the behavior of his degenerate son had broken before now....
Briefly framed in the doorway, Mrs. Heth added: "You must get some sleep to be fresh for the evening ... _I'll_ nail their slanderous falsehoods."
Her daughter's glance upon her was touched with a flash of admiration, the more striking in that she herself was quite unconscious of it.
Exact definition of desire and a simple strength of purpose from which all aims of others bound back stone-dead: what brilliance of genius or quintessence of mother-wit can hope to outdo this immortal combination?
Mrs. Heth's return to the upper regions, an hour later, trumpeted complete victory. The right note was struck; all was settled. Carlisle, it appeared, had trusted insufficiently to the virtue of the Heth name. Of horrid gossip there had been, at the worst, no more than a bare hint or two, an attenuated suggestion. Malicious as the world was, few, indeed, had dreamed any justification of Dalhousie's blackguardism. Already, it appeared, the hotel rang with objurgations of it, and him. Still, Mrs. Heth had struck the note, and struck hard.