influence of the music and the excited condition of her nerves, the event
became magnified, distorted; it burned into her brain. It was not made
less poignant by the sermon from the text: "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin."
When the words were first announced in the original, it sounded like her
own language, save that it was softer, and her heart throbbed fast. Then
came the interpretation: "Thou art weighed in the balance and found
wanting."

Then suddenly swept over her a new feeling, one she had never felt
before. Up to this point a determination to justify her child, to
reverse the verdict of the world, to turn her husband's sin upon himself,
had made her defiant, even bitter; in all things eager to live up to her
new life, to the standard that Richard had by manner and suggestion,
rather than by words, laid down for her. But now there came in upon her
a flood of despair. At best she was only of this race through one-third
of her parentage, and education and refinement and all things could do no
more than make her possible. There must always be in the record: "She
was of a strange people. She was born in a wigwam." She did not know
that failing health was really the cause of this lapse of self-
confidence, this growing self-depreciation, this languor for which she
could not account. She found that she could not toss the child and
frolic with it as she had done; she was conscious that within a month
there had stolen upon her the desire to be much alone, to avoid noises
and bustle--it irritated her. She found herself thinking more and more
of her father, her father to whom she had never written one line since
she had left the North. She had had good reasons for not writing--
writing could do no good whatever, particularly to a man who could not
read, and who would not have understood her new life if he had read. Yet
now she seemed not to know why she had not written, and to blame herself
for neglect and forgetfulness. It weighed on her. Why had she ever been