for a blessed half hour with bread and milk and prune pudding.

Then she dropped down on the window seat and leaned throbbing temples
against the cool glass. She had been on her feet since five that morning,
doing everybody's bidding, scolded and hurried by a nervous matron.
Mrs. Lippett, behind the scenes, did not always maintain that calm
and pompous dignity with which she faced an audience of Trustees
and lady visitors. Jerusha gazed out across a broad stretch of
frozen lawn, beyond the tall iron paling that marked the confines
of the asylum, down undulating ridges sprinkled with country estates,
to the spires of the village rising from the midst of bare trees.

The day was ended--quite successfully, so far as she knew.
The Trustees and the visiting committee had made their rounds,
and read their reports, and drunk their tea, and now were hurrying
home to their own cheerful firesides, to forget their bothersome
little charges for another month. Jerusha leaned forward
watching with curiosity--and a touch of wistfulness--the stream
of carriages and automobiles that rolled out of the asylum gates.
In imagination she followed first one equipage, then another,
to the big houses dotted along the hillside. She pictured herself
in a fur coat and a velvet hat trimmed with feathers leaning back
in the seat and nonchalantly murmuring `Home' to the driver.
But on the door-sill of her home the picture grew blurred.

Jerusha had an imagination--an imagination, Mrs. Lippett told her,
that would get her into trouble if she didn't take care--but keen
as it was, it could not carry her beyond the front porch of the
houses she would enter. Poor, eager, adventurous little Jerusha,
in all her seventeen years, had never stepped inside an ordinary house;