he conversations with him
in which she would overcome his delicate but natural scruples in the
matter and persuade him to her own way of thinking. She had even fixed
on the smallest sum--two dollars and a half a week--at which she
thought she might induce him to compromise, if all her eloquence
failed. She knew that he considered her the hard working, paid manager
of Outside Inn, and took it for granted that she had no other source
of income. She was a little disconcerted that he made no effort,
beyond thanking her sincerely and simply for her kindness, to put the
matter on a more concrete basis, but when he told her presently that
he was going to do a portrait of her, she scourged herself for her New
England perspective on an affair that he handled with so much
delicacy.

Her friends were, on the whole, pleased with her experiment in
vicarious motherhood. Dick instinctively resented the fact that Nancy
had taken Collier Pratt's daughter into her home and heart, but the
child herself was a delight to him, and he spent hours romping with
her and telling her stories, loading her with toys and sweetmeats, and
taking her off for enchanting holiday excursions "over the Palisades
and far away." Billy was hardly less diverted with her, and Betty
regarded her advent as a provision on the part of Providence against
things becoming too commonplace. Caroline, as was her wont, took the
child very seriously, and tried to interest Nancy in all the latest
educational theories for her development, including posture dancing,
and potato raising.

Nancy herself had loved the child from the moment the big lustrous
gray eyes opened, on the day of her sudden illness at Outside Inn, and
looked confidingly up into hers. For the first time in her life her
maternal ardor--the instinct which made her yearn to nourish and
minister to a race--had concentrated on a single human being. Sheila,
hungry for mothering, had turned to her with the simplicity of the
people among whom she had been brought up, taking her sympathetic
response as a matter of course; and the two were soon on the closest,
most affectionate terms.

Sheila and Outside Inn divided Nancy's time to the practical exclusion
of all other interests. She had, without realizing her processes,
taken into her life artificial responsibilities in almost exact
proportion to the normal ones of any woman who makes the choice of
marriage rather than that of a career. She was doing housekeeping