taken up again as soon as Fanny and Archibald were in bed, and no matter
how hard the day had been, she was always cheerful, always gay and
light-hearted for the dinner hour by the fireside. Not often had she
been too poor to buy a handful of flowers for the table, and never once,
except during her illness, had she come home too tired to change to the
black silk gown, which she had turned and made from bishop sleeves to
small ones, and from "dropped" shoulders to high ones, for the last six
or seven years. The damask on the table was darned and mended, but it
was always spotlessly fresh. In winter the fire was made up brightly in
the evenings; in summer the room was deliciously scented with rose
geranium and heliotrope from the box in the window. For ten years she
had not had a holiday; she had worked harder than a man, harder than any
servant, for she had worked from dawn until midnight; but into her hard
life she had instilled a quality of soul which had enabled her to endure
the strain without breaking. "No life is so hard that you can't make it
easier by the way you take it," she had said to herself in the
beginning; and remembering always that courage is one of the eternal
virtues, she had disciplined her mind as well as her body to firmness
and elasticity of fibre. "Nobody, except myself, is ever going to make
me happy," she would repeat over and over again when the day was
wearying and the work heavy. "I want to be happy. I have a right to be
happy, but it depends on myself."

This indestructible belief in her "right to happiness" supported her
through the hardest hours of her life, and diffused an invigorating
atmosphere not only in her home, but even in her long working hours at
Dinard's. The children grew and strengthened in its bracing air; Miss
Polly quickly responded to it; the women in the workroom breathed it in
as if it were the secret of health, and even Madame showed occasional
signs that she was not entirely impervious to its vital and joyous