I

DISAPPOINTED IN LIFE

Mary Alice came home quietly from the party. Most of the doors in the
house were closed, because it was cold, and the halls were hard to
heat. Mary Alice knew exactly what she should see and hear if she
opened that door at her right as she entered the house, and went into
the sitting-room. There was a soft-coal fire in the small,
old-fashioned grate under the old, old-fashioned white marble mantel.
Dozing--always dozing--on the hearth-rug, at a comfortable distance
from the fire, was Herod, the big yellow cat. In the centre of the
room, under the chandelier, was a table, with a cover of her mother's
fancy working, and a drop-light with a green shade. By the unbecoming
light of this, her mother was sewing. What day was this? Tuesday!
She was mending stockings. Mary Alice could see it all. She had been
seeing it for twenty years during which nothing--it seemed to her--had
changed, except herself. If she went in there now, her mother would
ask her the same questions she always asked: "Did you have a nice
time?" "Who was there?" "Anybody have on anything new?" "What
refreshments did they serve?"

Mary Alice was tired of it all--heartsick with weariness of it--and she
stole softly past that closed sitting-room door and up, through the
chilly halls where she could see her own breath, to her room.

She did not light the gas, but took off in the dark her "good" hat and
her "best" gloves and her long black cloth coat of an ugly
"store-bought" cut, which was her best and worst. Then, in an abandon
of grief which bespoke real desperation in a careful girl like Mary