to the door of
the brick house that she remembered to compose her face into a proper
gravity. She felt nervous and ill at ease. But she needn't go in, she
reminded herself, just leave the flowers at the door. If only there
were a maid, which there probably wasn't! One couldn't count for
certain on getting right away from these places where the people
themselves met one at the door.

"How do you do?" said a voice, advancing from the right. "What a
lovely basket!"

Elliott jumped. She was ready to jump at anything and she had been
looking straight ahead without a single glance aside from a
non-committal brick front. Now she saw a hammock swung between two
trees, a hammock still swaying from the impact of the girl who had
just left it.

She was the biggest girl Elliott had ever seen, tall and fat and
shapeless and very plain. She was all in white, which made her look
bigger, and her skirt was at least three years old. There was a faint
trickle of brown spots down the front of it, too, of which the girl
seemed utterly unaware.

"You don't have to tell me where those flowers come from," she said.
"You are Laura Cameron's cousin, aren't you? Glad to know you."

"Yes," said Elliott, "I am Elliott Cameron. Aunt Jessica sent these to
your mother."

The girl's fingers felt cool and firm as they touched Elliott's, the
only pleasant impression she had yet gathered.

"They look just like Mrs. Cameron. Sit down while I call Mother. Oh,
she's not doing anything special. Mother!"

Elliott, conducted through the house to a wide veranda, sank into a
chair, conscious in every nerve of her own slender waistline. What
must it feel like to be so big? A minute later she seemed to herself
to be engulfed between two mountains of flesh. A woman--more unwieldy,
more shapeless, more oppressive even than the girl--waddled across the
veranda floor. What she said Elliott really didn't know; afterward
phrases of pleasure came back to her vaguely. She distinctly
remembered the creaking of the rocking-chair when the woman sat down
and her own frightened feeling lest some vital part should give way
under the strain.

After a time, to her consciousness, mild blue eyes emerged from the
mass of human bulk that fronted her; gray hair crinkled away from a
broad white forehead. Then she perceived that Mrs. Gordon was not a
very tall woman, not so tall as was her daughter. If anything, that
made it worse, thought Elliott. Why, if she fell down, no