en before she got
her own room, when they were all sleeping and dressing together, like
little cubs, and breakfasting in the kitchen, she had led an absorbing
personal life of her own. But she had a cub loyalty to the other cubs.
She thought them nice boys and tried to make them get their lessons. She
once fought a bully who "picked on" Axel at school. She never made fun
of Anna's crimpings and curlings and beauty-rites.

Thea had always taken it for granted that her sister and brothers
recognized that she had special abilities, and that they were proud of
it. She had done them the honor, she told herself bitterly, to believe
that though they had no particular endowments, THEY WERE OF HER KIND,
and not of the Moonstone kind. Now they had all grown up and become
persons. They faced each other as individuals, and she saw that Anna and
Gus and Charley were among the people whom she had always recognized as
her natural enemies. Their ambitions and sacred proprieties were
meaningless to her. She had neglected to congratulate Charley upon
having been promoted from the grocery department of Commings's store to
the drygoods department. Her mother had reproved her for this omission.
And how was she to know, Thea asked herself, that Anna expected to be
teased because Bert Rice now came and sat in the hammock with her every
night? No, it was all clear enough. Nothing that she would ever do in
the world would seem important to them, and nothing they would ever do
would seem important to her.

Thea lay thinking intently all through the stifling afternoon. Tillie
whispered something outside her door once, but she did not answer. She
lay on her bed until the second church bell rang, and she saw the family
go trooping up the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street, Anna and
her father in the lead. Anna seemed to have taken on a very story-book
attitude toward her father; patronizing and condescending, it seemed to
Thea. The older boys were not in the family band. They now took their
girls to church. Tillie had stayed at home to get supper. Thea got up,
washed her hot face and arms, and put on the white organdie dress she
had worn last night; it was getting too small for her, and she might as
well wear it out. After she was dressed she unlocked her door and went
cautiously downstairs. She felt as if chilling hostilities might be
awaiting her in the trunk loft, on the stairway, almost anywhere. In the
dining-room she found Tillie, s