light of this, her mother was sewing. What day was this? Tuesday!
She was mending stockings. Mary Alice could see it all. She had been
seeing it for twenty years during which nothing--it seemed to her--had
changed, except herself. If she went in there now, her mother would
ask her the same questions she always asked: "Did you have a nice
time?" "Who was there?" "Anybody have on anything new?" "What
refreshments did they serve?"

Mary Alice was tired of it all--heartsick with weariness of it--and she
stole softly past that closed sitting-room door and up, through the
chilly halls where she could see her own breath, to her room.

She did not light the gas, but took off in the dark her "good" hat and
her "best" gloves and her long black cloth coat of an ugly
"store-bought" cut, which was her best and worst. Then, in an abandon
of grief which bespoke real desperation in a careful girl like Mary
Alice, she threw herself on her bed--without taking off her "good"
dress--and buried her head in a pillow, and _hated everything_.

It is hard to be disappointed in love, but after all it is a rather
splendid misery in which one may have a sense of kinship with earth's
greatest and best; and it has its hopes, its consolations. There is
often the hope that this love may return; and, though we never admit
it, there is always--deep down--the consolation of believing that
another and a better may come.

But to be disappointed in the love of life is not a splendid misery.
And Mary Alice was disappointed in her love of life. To be twenty, and
not to believe in the fairies of Romance; to be twenty and, instead of
the rosy dreams you've had, to see life stretching on and on before
you, an endless, uninspired humdrum like mother's, darning stockings by
the sitting-room fire--that is bitterness indeed.

Hardship isn't anything--while you believe in life. Stiff toil and
scant fare are nothing--while you expect to meet at any turning the
Enchanter with your fortune in his hands. But to be twenty and not to
believe----!

Mary Alice had never had much, except the wonderful heart of youth, to
feed her faith with. She wasn't pretty and she wasn't clever and she
had no accomplishments. Her people were "plain" and perpetually
"pinched" in circumstance. And her life, in this small town where she
lived, was very narrow.

In the mornings, Mary Alice helped her mother with the housework. In
the afternoons, after the midday dinner wa