among the poor;
the volcano which had been Nina overflowing elsewhere in a smart little
house with a butler out on the Ridgely Road.

She looked what she was, faithful and quietly loyal, steady--and serene;
not asking greatly but hoping much; full of small unvisualized dreams
and little inarticulate prayers; waiting, without knowing that she was
waiting.

Sometimes she worried. She thought she ought to "do something." A good
many of the girls she knew wanted to do something, but they were vague
as to what. She felt at those times that she was not being very useful,
and she had gone so far as to lay the matter before her father a couple
of years before, when she was just eighteen.

"Just what do you think of doing?" he had inquired.

"That's it," she had said despondently. "I don't know. I haven't any
particular talent, you know. But I don't think I ought to go on having
you support me in idleness all my life."

"Well, I don't think it likely that I'll have to," he had observed,
dryly. "But here's the point, and I think it's important. I don't intend
to work without some compensation, and my family is my compensation.
You just hang around and make me happy, as you do, and you're fulfilling
your economic place in the nation. Don't you forget it, either."

That had comforted her. She had determined then never to marry but to
hang around, as he suggested, for the rest of her life. She was quite
earnest about it, and resolved.

She picked up the blue dress and standing before her mirror, held it up
before her. It looked rather shabby, she thought, but the theater was
not like a dance, and anyhow it would look better at night. She had been
thinking about next Wednesday evening ever since Dick Livingstone
had gone. It seemed, better somehow, frightfully important. It was
frightfully important. For the first time she acknowledged to herself
that she had been fond of him, as she put it, for a long time. She had
an odd sense, too, of being young and immature, and as though he had
stooped to her from some height: such as thirty-two years and being in
the war, and having to decide about life and death, and so on.

She hoped he did not think she was only a child.

She heard Nina coming up the stairs. At the click of her high heels on
the hard wood she placed the dress on the bed again, and went to the
window. Her father was on the path below, clearly headed for a walk. She
knew then that Nina had been asking for something.