Mrs. Filmer was greatly humiliated by this failure, but not inclined to abandon her plan; and Rose pretended to be well pleased that she had been "cut by such a dreary crowd of purple and fine linen Pharisees. However," she said, "as I have opened my house, I intend to fill it. Young men and young women who want to dance will go anywhere, if there is a good floor, with good music and plenty of wines and ices. If I cannot be exclusive, I can at least be popular. If you do not like my company, mamma, you need not endorse it. I shall take no offence at your scruples. As for Harry and his excellent wife, I never will pretend to be glad to see them any more as long as I live. When society declines to accept Mrs. Antony Van Hoosen, you cannot make it accept her, mamma."
"I am sure, Rose, there are plenty of people in the best society who have been talked about in far worse fashion than you have."
"That is true enough; but society, now and then, gets very moral and thinks it necessary to have a scapegoat whom it can punish for all the rest. At present it is laying its sins on my head, and driving me out to the wilderness; though it has plenty inside its high fence just as bad as I am, mamma." Then she was suddenly quiet, as if remembering. "Mamma, when I was in London I saw a picture of myself." Mrs. Filmer looked at her curiously and inquiringly, and she went on, with a kind of desperate indignation:
"It was in a gallery. It was called _The Sacrificial Goat_. The poor tormented creature was plodding with weary feet through the quaking wilderness, under the crimson rocks of Edom, and by the shores of the Dead Sea. I could not keep away from that picture. I felt as if I could do anything to give the fainting animal a drink of cold water. No one feels that about me"--and she flung herself among the satin cushions of her sofa and began to sob like a lost child.
"Oh, Rose! Rose! How can you say so? What would I not do to make you happy?"
"Leave me alone, dear mamma. Do not be miserable about me. I am not worth worrying over; and I do not care the snap of my fingers for your society! Only, do not tell papa anything against his little Rose. He will never find out I am sorrowful and despised unless you say it in his very ears."