dearest brother wanted her company; she was, as Mrs. Paget told her
over and over, "the sweetest daughter any woman ever had." But deep in
her heart she knew moods of bitter distaste and restlessness. The
struggle did not seem worth the making; the odds against her seemed
too great.

Still dreaming in the winter dark, she went through the home gate, and
up the porch steps of a roomy, cheap house that had been built in the
era of scalloped and pointed shingles, of colored glass embellishments
around the window-panes, of perforated scroll work and wooden railings
in Grecian designs. A mass of wet over-shoes lay on the porch, and two
or three of the weather-stained porch rockers swayed under the weight
of spread wet raincoats. Two opened umbrellas wheeled in the current
of air that came around the house; the porch ran water. While Margaret
was adding her own rainy-day equipment to the others, a golden brown
setter, one ecstatic wriggle from nose to tail, flashed into view, and
came fawning to her feet.

"Hello, Bran!" Margaret said, propping herself against the house with
one hand, while she pulled at a tight overshoe. "Hello, old fellow!
Well, did they lock him out?"

She let herself and a freezing gust of air into the dark hall, groping
to the hat-rack for matches. While she was lighting the gas, a very
pretty girl of sixteen, with crimson cheeks and tumbled soft dark
hair, came to the dining-room door. This was her sister Julie,
Margaret's roommate and warmest admirer, and for the last year or two
her inseparable companion. Julie had her finger in a book, but now she
closed it, and said affectionately between her yawns: "Come in here,
darling! You must be dead."