cards and photographs and small souvenirs of all sorts, that had
been stuck in between the glass and the frame. There were dance
cards with dangling tiny pencils on tasseled cords, and score cards
plastered with tiny stars. There were calling cards, and newspaper
clippings, and tintypes taken of young people at the beach or the
Chutes. A round pilot-biscuit, with a dozen names written on it in
pencil, was tied with a midshipman's hat-ribbon, there were wooden
plates and champagne corks, and toy candy-boxes in the shapes of
guitars and fire-crackers. Miss Georgie Lancaster, at twenty-eight,
was still very girlish and gay, and she shared with her mother and
sisters the curious instinctive acquisitiveness of the woman who,
powerless financially and incapable of replacing, can only save.

Moments went by, a quarter-hour, a half-hour, and still Susan sat
hunched up stupidly over her book. It was not an interesting
magazine, she had read it before, and her thoughts ran in an uneasy
undercurrent while she read. "I ought to be doing my hair--it must
be half-past six o'clock--I must stop this--"

It was almost half-past six when the door opened suddenly, and a
large woman came in.

"Well, hello, little girlie!" said the newcomer, panting from the
climb upstairs, and turning a cold, fresh-colored cheek for Susan's
kiss. She took off a long coat, displaying beneath, a black walking-
skirt, an elaborate high collar, and a view of shabby corset and
shabby corset-cover between. "Ma wanted butter," she explained, with
a pleasant, rueful smile, "and I just slipped into anything to go
for it!"