or subjects of conversation, and
still determined by the hot memory of her night's vigil to leave no
stone of geniality unturned, she added:

"This is a book that I am reading to help me to know how to guide and
educate you. I haven't had much experience in adopting children, you
know, Eleanor, and when there is anything in this world that you don't
know, there is usually some good and useful book that will help you to
find out all about it."

Even to herself her words sounded hatefully patronizing and pedagogic,
but she was past the point of believing that she could handle the
situation with grace. When Eleanor's breath seemed to be coming
regularly, she put down her book with some thankfulness and escaped to
the tea table, where she poured tea for her aunt, and explained the
child's idiosyncrasies swiftly and smoothly to that estimable lady.

Left alone, Eleanor lay still for a while, staring at the design of
pink roses on the blue wall-paper. On Cape Cod, pink and blue were not
considered to be colors that could be combined. There was nothing at
all in New York like anything she knew or remembered. She sighed. Then
she made her way to the window and picked up the book Beulah had been
reading. It was about _her_, Aunt Beulah had said,--directions for
educating her and training her. The paragraph that caught her eye
where the book was open had been marked with a pencil.

"This girl had such a fat, frog like expression of face," Eleanor
read, "that her neighbors thought her an idiot. She was found to be
the victim of a severe case of ad-e-noids." As she spelled out the
word, she recognized it as the one Beulah had used earlier in the day.
She remembered the sudden sharp look with which the question had been
accompanied. The sick lady for whom she had "worked out" had often
called her an idiot when her feet had stumbled, or she had failed to
understand at once what was required of her.

Eleanor read on. She encountered a text replete with hideous examples
of backward and deficient children, victims of adenoids who had been
restored to a state of normality by the removal of the affliction. She
had no idea what an adenoid was. She had a hazy notion that it was a
kind of superfluous bone in the region of the breast, but her anguish
was rooted in the fact that this, _this_ was the good and useful book
that her Aunt Beulah had found it necessary to resort to for guidance,
in the case of her own--Eleanor's--education.