na, never interfering in her ways, always glad to see her
and to make her visits pleasant, but she had not found favour in our
good Anna's sight.

Anna had too, no real affection for her nieces. She never scolded
them or tried to guide them for their good. Anna never criticised or
interfered in the running of her half brother's house.

Mrs. Federner was a good looking, prosperous woman, a little harsh and
cold within her soul perhaps, but trying always to be pleasant, good
and kind. Her daughters were well trained, quiet, obedient, well
dressed girls, and yet our good Anna loved them not, nor their mother,
nor any of their ways.

It was in this house that Anna had first met her friend, the widow,
Mrs. Lehntman.

The Federners had never seemed to feel it wrong in Anna, her devotion
to this friend and her care of her and of her children. Mrs. Lehntman
and Anna and her feelings were all somehow too big for their attack.
But Mrs. Federner had the mind and tongue that blacken things. Not
really to blacken black, of course, but just to roughen and to rub on
a little smut. She could somehow make even the face of the Almighty
seem pimply and a little coarse, and so she always did this with her
friends, though not with the intent to interfere.

This was really true with Mrs. Lehntman that Mrs. Federner did not
mean to interfere, but Anna's friendship with the Drehtens was a very
different matter.

Why should Mrs. Drehten, that poor common working wife of a man who
worked for others in a brewery and who always drank too much, and was
not like a thrifty, decent german man, why should that Mrs. Drehten
and her ugly, awkward daughters be getting presents from her husband's
sister all the time, and her husband always so good to Anna, and one
of the girls having her name too, and those Drehtens all strangers to
her and never going to come to any good? It was not right for Anna to
do so.

Mrs. Federner knew better than to say such things straight out to her
husband's fiery, stubborn sister, but she lost no chance to let Anna
feel and see what they all thought.

It was easy to blacken all the Drehtens, their poverty, the husband's
drinking, the four big sons carrying on and always lazy, the awkward,
ugly daughters dressing up with Anna's help and trying to look so
fine, and the poor, weak, hard-working sickly mother, so easy to
degrade with large dosings of contemptuous pity.

Anna could not do much with these attacks for Mr