"It's awful. Oh, mother, don't!"

"A good many things are awful," said her mother. "Injustice is awful;
if you want to set yourself up against your mother, you can. I've
laid out this road that's just an' right, an' I'm goin' on it; you
can do jest as you're a-mind to. If you want to tell her when she
comes back, you can. I ain't ashamed of it, for I know I'm doin' what
is just an' right."

Mrs. Field noted how the photographed woman's dress was trimmed with
fringe, after the fashion of one she had worn twenty years ago.

Lois looked across the room at her mother's pale, stern face bending
over the album. The garlands on Mrs. Maxwell's parlor carpet might
have been the flora of a whole age, she and her mother seemed so far
apart, with that recession of soul which can cover more than earthly
spaces. To the young girl with her scared, indignant eyes the older
woman seemed actually living and breathing under new conditions in
some strange element.

"Flora, Flora, where be you?" Mrs. Maxwell called out in the entry.

They heard her climbing the chamber stairs; but she soon came into
the parlor with a little glass of currant wine.

"Here, you'd better drink this right down," she said to Lois; "it
won't hurt you. I don't see where Flora is, for my part. She ain't
upstairs. Drink it right down."