f her room.

Still her retirement seemed to work her no ill. From these solitary
vigils she always emerged dressed in her gray-and-lavender. Ordinarily
the ladies Bray wore percale on week day afternoons--fresh ones, but
prints for all that. That had been Nell's way. Although old Mrs. Bray
had a closet hung with good wool dresses, and even one festival silk.

Myra's trousseau had been so simple as scarcely to deserve the name. She
had been married in a neat, dark suit, turned out in the shop where she
had been employed for more than seven years. Myra had been "on skirts"
for most of the seven years; and her dress had been almost a
uniform--skirt and blouse. But she had secretly sewed for herself
another sort of dress--house-dresses for the afternoon, of inexpensive,
but delicate and light-colored fabrics, made a little "fussy." These she
never wore. Old Mrs. Bray never wore fussy clothes; and it had not been
Nell's way. The gray-and-lavender challis had been in the nature of an
experiment. Old Mrs. Bray was plainly pleased; but she rarely wore it.
She said it would make it common.

So the Brays, as in Nellie's regime, continued to wear the common gray
percales, and to eat off the common white crockery. And with a strange,
bewitched pertinacity, the fine, decorative bits of china, shut away on
their upper shelf in the safe continued to get themselves broken.

Once it was one of the glasses of George's wife's lemonade-set. These
glasses had ornate gilt bands about the brim, and painted flowers upon
the side. Taking down the set one day, to show George's wife's gift to a
caller (gifts were never gifts in fee simple in the Bray household.
Always part possession seemed vested in the donor) old Mrs. Bray let
slip one of the glasses. The fragments lay in a path of sun, struck
through and through with light, they seemed to possess a strange, new
iridescence.

"Now ain't that too bad!" sympathized the caller. "Spoils the whole set.
You want to get every bit of that glass up and in the ash-can. Glass is
awful to grind in."

Old Mrs. Bray gathered up the pieces. They sent out strange gleams like
rude gems. Myra and the caller watched sympathetically the eager
abruptness of her departure.

"Your mother-in-law is some shaky," observed the caller. "She hadn't
ought to go to handle such delicate things."

"I expect she won't come out again," Myra said. "It always makes Mother
feel bad to break things."

Old Mrs. Bray did no