the harsh voice had asked about "the girl's trunk," Sheila's
sensitiveness had begun to suffer. It was not easy, even with Babe's
good-humored help, to go down into the kitchen and submit to Mrs.
Hudson's hectoring. "Momma" had all the insolence of the underdog. Of her
daughters, as of her husband, she was very much afraid. They all bullied
her, Babe with noisy, cheerful effrontery--"sass" Sylvester called
it--and Girlie with a soft, unyielding tyranny that had the smothering
pressure of a large silk pillow. Girlie was tall and serious and
beautiful, the proud possessor of what Millings called "a perfect form."
She was inexpressibly slow and untidy, vain and ignorant and
self-absorbed. At this time her whole being was centered upon the
attentions of Jim Greely, with whom she was "keeping company." With Jim
Greely in her mind, she had looked Sheila over, thin and weary Sheila in
her shabby black dress, and had decided that here no danger threatened.
Nevertheless she did not take chances. Sheila had been in Millings a
fortnight and had not met the admirable Jim. Her attempt that morning to
send the note to Dickie by Jim was exactly the action that led to the
painful splitting of her shell.

She had seen from her window Sylvester's departure after breakfast. There
was something in his grim, angular figure, moving carefully over the icy
pavement in the direction of the hotel, that gave her a pang for Dickie.
She was sure that Hudson was going to be very disagreeable in spite of
her attempt to soften his anger. And she was sorry that Dickie, with his
odd, wistful, friendly face and his eyes so wide and youthful and
apologetic for their visions, should think that she was angry or
disgusted. She wrote her letter in a little glow of rescue, and was proud
of the tact of that reference to his "fall down the steps"--for she
reasoned that the self-esteem of any boy of nineteen must suffer
poignantly over the memory of being knocked down by his father before the