a sense of something agreeable on the way, and Diantha
promptly acted on her advantage.

"Mama, you are to try on your new dress at ten o'clock, and it's nine
already."

"Nine!" moaned Annabel. "You should have called me before." Yet she
made no effort to rise and after a moment added sharply: "What are you
waiting for? Can't you see I'm awake?"

Diantha scurried like a rabbit, and her mother turned on her pillow for
another half-hour, an indulgence she would not have ventured under her
daughter's observant eyes. Like many people who defy public opinion in
large matters, she was acutely sensitive to criticism over trifles.
Aspersions of her character she accepted philosophically, almost
complacently indeed, because of her inward conviction that they were
indirectly a tribute paid by jealousy to her superior fascinations.
But a suggestion that a dress was unbecoming would make her unhappy for
days.

Her first act on rising was to run up the shade, in order to benefit by
the full light of the morning sun. Then for some minutes she studied
her reflection in a little hand-mirror which gave back to her view a
face rapt and absorbed. With Annabel this rite was a substitute for
morning prayer, and it brought her a peace not always secured by
equally sincere devotions. Diantha's willowy height woke in her a
sense of exasperated fear. It sometimes seemed to her that the girl's
growth was with deliberate purpose, a malicious demonstration of the
fact that her mother was not so young as she looked.

The testimony of the hand-mirror was reassuring, clear pink and white,
the crisp freshness of apple blossoms. Annabel worshiped and rose from
her knees, duly fortified against the mischances of the day, though her
divinity had been only her own beauty.

At nineteen, Annabel had married a man twenty years her senior, who
like many of his sex assumed that a pretty wife is from the Lord and
associated amiability, compliance and other feminine graces with a
rose-leaf complexion. The earlier years of their married life had been
a succession of ghastly struggles in which both sides had been worsted,
descending to incredible brutalities. Sinclair was essentially a
gentleman, and long after those contentious years he sometimes woke
from his sleep in a cold sweat, remembering what he had said to his
wife and she to him. Her unwelcome motherhood had only widened the
breach between them. Her hysterically fierce resentment of