reproach, into her mother's empty bedroom. Mrs. Lessways had contracted
a severe cold in the head, a malady to which she was subject and which
she accepted with fatalistic submission, even pleasurably giving herself
up to it, as a martyr to the rack. Mrs. Lessways' colds annoyed Hilda,
who out of her wisdom could always point to the precise indiscretion
which had caused them, and to whom the spectacle of a head wrapped day
and night in flannel was offensively ridiculous. Moreover, Hilda in
these crises was further and still more acutely exasperated by the
pillage of her handkerchiefs. Although she possessed a supply of
handkerchiefs far beyond her own needs, she really hated to lend to her
mother in the hour of necessity. She did lend, and she lent without
spoken protest, but with frigid bitterness. Her youthful passion for
order and efficiency was aggrieved by her mother's negligent and
inadequate arrangements for coping with the inevitable plague. She now
made a police-visit to the bedroom because she considered that her
mother had been demanding handkerchiefs at a stage too early in the
progress of the disease. Impossible that her mother should have come to
the end of her own handkerchiefs! She knew with all the certitude of her
omniscience that numerous clean handkerchiefs must be concealed
somewhere in the untidiness of her mother's wardrobe.

See her as she enters the bedroom, the principal bedroom of the house,
whose wide bed and large wardrobe recall the past when she had a father
as well as a mother, and when that bedroom awed her footsteps! A thin,
brown-frocked girl, wearing a detested but enforced small black apron;
with fine, pale, determined features, rather unfeminine hair, and
glowering, challenging black eyes. She had a very decided way of putting
down her uncoquettishly shod feet. Absurdly young, of course; wistfully
young! She was undeveloped, and did not even look nearly twenty-one. You
are at liberty to smile at her airs; at that careless critical glance