money, and Jennie Randolph even sat down and cried
when I wouldn't take it. Then they agreed to let me launder all their
fine lace and embroidered blouses, and I've made desserts and cakes for
some of them and--and--"

"Don't go on, Sally, I can't stand it. I'm a crackbrained fool and I'm
going to cry."

"Of course, the worst part was having to leave you, but when George
found out about it, he insisted upon fetching and carrying my bundles."

"George!" I exclaimed sharply, and a spasm of pain, like the entrance of
poison into an unhealed wound, contracted my heart. "Was that confounded
package under his arm," I questioned, almost angrily, "some of the
stuff?"

"That was a blouse of Maggie Tyler's. He is going to take it back to her
on Friday. There, now, stay quiet, while I run and speak to him. He is
waiting for me in the kitchen."

She went out, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for her
to take in washing and for George to deliver it, while, opening the long
green shutters, I sat staring, beyond the humming-birds and the white
columns, to the shimmering haze that hung over the old tea-roses and the
dwindled box in the garden. Here the heat, though it was still visible
to the eyes, was softened and made fragrant by the greenness of the
trees and the grass and by the perfume of the jessamine and the old
tea-roses, dropping their faintly coloured leaves in the sunshine. From
time to time the sounds of the city, grown melancholy and discordant,
like the sounds that one hears in fever, reached me across the
shimmering vagueness of the garden.

And then as I sat there, with folded hands, there came to me, out of
some place, so remote that it seemed a thousand miles away from the
sunny stillness, and yet so near that I knew it existed only within my
soul, a sense of failure, of helplessness, of humiliation. A hundred
casual memories thronged through my mind, and all these memories,
gathering significance from my imagination, plunged me deeper into the
bitter despondency which had closed over my head. I saw the General,
with his little, alert bloodshot eyes, like the eyes of an intelligent
bulldog, with that look of stubbornness, of tenacity, persisting beneath
the sly humour that gleamed in his face, as if he were thinking always
somewhere far back in his brain, "I'll hang on to the death, I'll hang
on to the death." His figure, which, because of that legendary glamour I
had seen surrounding it in chil