and consider everything from her view-point before speaking. Many a time
it helped her curb her active little tongue, and many a time it helped
her to condone the one fault which particularly irritated her.

"Of course it is hard for her to keep her half of the room in order,"
she would say to herself. "She's always had a maid to wait on her, and
has never been obliged to pick up even her own stockings. She doesn't
know how to be neat, and probably I shouldn't, either, if I hadn't been
so carefully trained."

Then she would hang the rumpled skirts back in the wardrobe where they
belonged, rescue her overturned work-basket from some garment that
Ethelinda had carelessly thrown across it, and patiently straighten out
the confusion of books and papers on the table they shared in common.
Although there were no more frozen silences between them their
conversations were far from satisfactory. They were totally uncongenial.
But after the first week, that part of their relationship did not
affect Mary materially. She was too happily absorbed in the work and
play of school life, throwing herself into every recitation, every
excursion and every experience with a zest that left no time for
mourning over what might have been. At bed-time there was always her
shadow-chum to share the recollections of the day. One of her letters to
Joyce gave a description of the state of resignation to which she
finally attained.

"Think of it!" she wrote. "Me with my Puritan conscience and big bump of
order, and my r.m. calmly embroidering this Sabbath afternoon! Her
dressing table, her bed and the chairs look like rubbish heaps. Her
bed-room slippers in the middle of the floor this time of day make me
want to gnash my teeth. Really it is a disaster to live with some one