The girl turned half round in her chair. She was fronting a mirror. She
caught a momentary impression of herself--pallid, hollow-eyed, weary. She
sighed.

"There are other ways of forgetting," she murmured. "There is work."

Her mother laughed scornfully.

"You have chosen your way," she said, "let me choose mine. Turn round,
Hester."

The girl obeyed her languidly. Her mother eyed her with an attention she
seldom vouchsafed to anything. Her plain black frock was ill-fitting and
worn. She wore no ribbon or jewellery or adornment of any sort.
Negatively her face was not ill-pleasing, but her figure was angular, and
her complexion almost anæmic. The woman on the couch represented other
things. She was tastefully, though somewhat elaborately dressed. She wore
chains and trinkets about her neck, rings upon her fingers, and in her
face had begun in earnest the tragic struggle between an actual forty and
presumptive twenty. She laughed again, a little hardly.

"And you are my daughter," she exclaimed. "You are one of the freaks of
heredity. I'm perfectly certain you don't belong to me, and as for him--"

"Stop!" the girl cried.

The woman nodded.

"Quite right," she said. "I didn't mean to mention him. I won't again.
But we are different, aren't we? I wonder why you stay with me. I wonder