point, for after all Miss Annie was no relative of hers and had no
business coming there and making trouble all the time. Appealing to
the mother was no use. It was wonderful how Mrs. Lehntman could listen
and not hear, could answer and yet not decide, could say and do what
she was asked and yet leave things as they were before.

One day it got almost too bad for even Anna's friendship to bear out.

"Well, Julia, is your mamma out?" Anna asked, one Sunday summer
afternoon, as she came into the Lehntman house.

Anna looked very well this day. She was always careful in her dress
and sparing of new clothes. She made herself always fulfill her own
ideal of how a girl should look when she took her Sundays out. Anna
knew so well the kind of ugliness appropriate to each rank in life.

It was interesting to see how when she bought things for Miss Wadsmith
and later for her cherished Miss Mathilda and always entirely from her
own taste and often as cheaply as she bought things for her friends
or for herself, that on the one hand she chose the things having the
right air for a member of the upper class, and for the others always
the things having the awkward ugliness that we call Dutch. She knew
the best thing in each kind, and she never in the course of her strong
life compromised her sense of what was the right thing for a girl to
wear.

On this bright summer Sunday afternoon she came to the Lehntmans',
much dressed up in her new, brick red, silk waist trimmed with broad
black beaded braid, a dark cloth skirt and a new stiff, shiny, black
straw hat, trimmed with colored ribbons and a bird. She had on new