of being thrust out more than she felt her impoverishment;
so she went back to Chicago to live with her widowed mother on an income
of five hundred a year. This experience had given her sentimental nature
an incurable hurt. Something withered away in her. Her head had a
downward droop; her step was soft and apologetic, even in her mother's
house, and her smile had the sickly, uncertain flicker that so often
comes from a secret humiliation. She was affable and yet shrinking, like
one who has come down in the world, who has known better clothes, better
carpets, better people, brighter hopes. Her husband was buried in the
Andersen lot in St. Paul, with a locked iron fence around it. She had to
go to his eldest brother for the key when she went to say good-bye to
his grave. She clung to the Swedish Church because it had been her
husband's church.

As her mother had no room for her household belongings, Mrs. Andersen
had brought home with her only her bedroom set, which now furnished her
own room at Mrs. Lorch's. There she spent most of her time, doing
fancywork or writing letters to sympathizing German friends in St. Paul,
surrounded by keepsakes and photographs of the burly Oscar Andersen.
Thea, when she was admitted to this room, and shown these photographs,
found herself wondering, like the Andersen family, why such a lusty,
gay-looking fellow ever thought he wanted this pallid, long-cheeked
woman, whose manner was always that of withdrawing, and who must have
been rather thin-blooded even as a girl.

Mrs. Andersen was certainly a depressing person. It sometimes annoyed
Thea very much to hear her insinuating knock on the door, her flurried
explanation of why she had come, as she backed toward the stairs. Mrs.
Andersen admired Thea greatly. She thought it a distinction to be even a
"temporary soprano"--Thea called herself so quite seriously--in the
Swedish Church. She also thought it distinguished to be a pupil of
Harsanyi's. She considered Thea very handsome, very Swedish, very
talented. She fluttered about the upper floor when Thea was practicing.
In short, she tried to make a heroine of her, just as Tillie Kronborg
had always done, and Thea was conscious of something of the sort. When
she was working and heard Mrs. Andersen tip-toeing past her door, she
used to shrug her shoulders and wonder whether she was always to have a
Tillie diving furtively about her in some disguise or other.

At the dressmaker's Mrs. Anderse