John's wife had always been to her a
most uncomfortable sort of person; she had dreaded her not frequent
visits to their home. Both were glad when they were over. Twenty
years had passed since his marriage; she never seemed to get any
nearer to his wife. Now the time had come to go and live with them,
she shrank from it, and postponed it for weeks, but John was
inflexible, he was an upright man, and bound to do his part in
sharing the burden of his mother's maintenance.

Mrs. John Kensett was one of those icy women with thin lips and cold
grey eyes, made up from the first without a heart--women who make a
cool atmosphere about them even in the heat of summer. She was tall
and stylish and handsomely dressed, and when she mounted her gold
eyeglasses and through them severely looked one over, she was
formidable indeed to so meek a woman as her mother-in-law. She must
have married John Kensett because an establishment is more complete
with a man at the head of it, for that was the chief end of her life
to keep all things in perfect running order in that elegantly
appointed home, and to keep abreast of the times in all new adornings
and furnishings under the sun. One Scripture admonition at least she
gave heed to: she looked well to the ways of her household. One might
explore from garret to cellar in that house and find nothing out of
place, nothing soiled, nothing left undone that should have been
done. She was withal, a rigid economist in small things. Everything
was kept under lock and key, and doled out in very small quantities
to the servants. Her table could never merit the charge of being
vulgarly loaded; the furnace heat was never allowed to run above a
certain mark on the thermometer, no matter who shivered, and she had
doubtless walked miles in turning gas jets to just the right point.

In this most elegant, precise, immaculate house, where everything and
everybody was controlled by certain unvarying and inflexible rules,
the old mother felt almost as straitened as she ever had in the small
topsy-turvy one.

Her room was scarcely above shivering point, and the back windows
overlooked no cheerful prospect. Here day after day she sat alone;
she had food and shelter and clothes, what more could old people
possibly want? At meal times her son was silent and abstracted or
absorbed in his newspaper. If anybody had told him that his old
mother's heart was nearly breaking for lack of loving sympathy, he
would have bee