very
hard for our good Anna to endure. Of course she did her best to scold,
to save for Mrs. Lehntman, and to put things in their place the way
they ought to be.

Even in the early days when Anna was first won by the glamour of
Mrs. Lehntman's brilliancy and charm, she had been uneasy in Mrs.
Lehntman's house with a need of putting things to rights. Now that the
two children growing up were of more importance in the house, and now
that long acquaintance had brushed the dazzle out of Anna's eyes, she
began to struggle to make things go here as she thought was right.

She watched and scolded hard these days to make young Julia do the way
she should. Not that Julia Lehntman was pleasant in the good Anna's
sight, but it must never be that a young girl growing up should have
no one to make her learn to do things right.

The boy was easier to scold, for scoldings never sank in very deep,
and indeed he liked them very well for they brought with them new
things to eat, and lively teasing, and good jokes.

Julia, the girl, grew very sullen with it all, and very often won her
point, for after all Miss Annie was no relative of hers and had no
business coming there and making trouble all the time. Appealing to
the mother was no use. It was wonderful how Mrs. Lehntman could listen
and not hear, could answer and yet not decide, could say and do what
she was asked and yet leave things as they were before.

One day it got almost too bad for even Anna's friendship to bear out.

"Well, Julia, is your mamma out?" Anna asked, one Sunday summer
afternoon, as she came into the Lehntman house.

Anna looked very well this day. She was always careful in her dress
and sparing of new clothes. She made herself always fulfill her own
ideal of how a girl should look when she took her Sundays out. Anna
knew so well the kind of ugliness appropriate to each rank in life.

It was interesting to see how when she bought things for Miss Wadsmith
and later for her cherished Miss Mathilda and always entirely from her
own taste and often as cheaply as she bought things for her friends
or for herself, that on the one hand she chose the things having the
right air for a member of the upper class, and for the others always
the things having the awkward ugliness that we call Dutch. She knew
the best thing in each kind, and she never in the course of her strong
life compromised her sense of what was the right thing for a girl to
wear.

On this bright s