ghastly flippancy, contradicted by her intense manner. A laugh went
around, and a young fellow with a handsome, unshaven face caught her
by the arm.

"You'd better strike to have the shop shut up the day you're
married," said he; but Abby flung away from him.

"I'll thank you to let me alone, Tom Hardy," she said, with a snap;
and the men laughed harder.

Abby was attractive to men in spite of her smallness and leanness
and incisiveness of manner. She was called mighty smart and dry,
which was the shop synonym for witty, and her favors, possibly
because she never granted them, were accounted valuable. Abby Atkins
had more admirers than many a girl who was prettier and presumably
more winning in every way, and could have married twice to their
once. But Abby had no wish for a lover. "I've got all I can do to
earn my own living and the living of them that belong to me," said
she.

That afternoon Andrew Brewster stayed at home. After dinner Eva
Tenny and her little girl came in, and Ellen went down street on an
errand.

Mrs. Zelotes Brewster was crossing her yard to her son's house when
she saw Ellen passing, and paused to gaze at her with that superb
pride which pertains to self and is yet superior to it. It was the
idealized pride of her own youth. When she proceeded again against
the February gusts, it was with an unconscious aping of her
granddaughter's freedom of gait. Mrs. Zelotes wore an old red
cashmere scarf crossed over her bosom; she held up her black skirts
in front, and they trailed pointedly in the rear; she also stood
well back on her heels, and when she paused in the wind-swept yard
presented a curious likeness to an old robin pausing for
reconnoitre. Fanny and Eva Tenny in the next house saw her coming.

"Look at her holding up her dress in front and letting it drag in
the back," said Eva. "It always seemed to me there was somethin'
wrong about any woman that held up her dress in front and let it
drag behind."

Eva retained all the coarse beauty of her youth, but lines of
unalterable hardness were fixed on her forehead and at her mouth
corners, and the fierce flush in her cheeks was as set as paint. Her
beauty had endured the siege; no guns of mishaps could affect it,
but that charm of evanescence which awakens tenderness was gone. Jim
Tenny's affection seemed to be waning, and Eva looked at herself in
the glass even when bedecked with tawdry finery, and owned that she
did not wonder. She stra