had learned to venerate gray hairs, and it was an awful shock to learn that so
many of the feeble creatures about her were coarse, wicked, and evil-disposed.
How could their withered lips frame the words they spoke? How could they
dwell on subjects that were profanation, even to such wrecks of womanhood as
themselves?

Moreover, they persecuted her by their curiosity. The good material in her
apparel had been examined and commented on; her wedding ring had been seen and
its absence soon noted, for Alida, after gaining the power to recall the past
fully, had thrown away the metal lie, feeling that it was the last link in a
chain binding her to a loathed and hated relationship. Learning from their
questions that the inmates of the almshouse did not know her history, she
refused to reveal it, thus awakening endless surmises. Many histories were
made for her, the beldams vying with each other in constructing the worst one.
Poor Alida soon learned that there was public opinion even in an almshouse,
and that she was under its ban. In dreary despondency she thought, "They've
found out about me. If such creatures as these think I'm hardly fit to speak
to, how can I ever find work among good, respectable people?"

Her extreme depression, the coarse, vulgar, and uncharitable natures by which
she was surrounded, retarded her recovery. By her efforts to do anything in
her power for others she disarmed the hostility of some of the women, and
those that were more or less demented became fond of her; but the majority
probed her wound by every look and word. She was a saint compared with any of
these, yet they made her envy their respectability. She often thought, "Would
to God that I was as old and ready to die as the feeblest woman here, if I
could only hold up my head like her!"

One day a woman who had a child left it sleeping in its rude wooden cradle and
went downstairs. The babe wakened and began to cry. Alida took it up and