s him into accepting
it. She had the intent look of the schemer: yet she was one who meant
well and simply preferred by nature to be stationary. Grandmother
feared her besides hating her, though loving the order she brought to
pass.

Esther slipped by her, and went to the bed where grandmother was lying
propped on pillows, an exceedingly small old woman who was even to
life-long friends an enigma presumably without an answer. She had the
remote air of hating her state of age, which did not seem a natural
necessity but a unique calamity, a trap sprung on her and, after the
nature of traps, most unexpectedly. When she was young she had believed
the old walked into the trap deliberately because it was provided on a
path they were tired of. But she wasn't tired, and yet the trap had
clutched her. She had a small face beautifully wrought upon by lines, as
if she had given a cunning artificer the preparation of a mask she was
paying dearly for and yet didn't prize at all. An old-fashioned nightcap
with a frill covered her head, and she had tied herself so tightly into
it that he must be a bold adventurer who would get at the thoughts
inside. Her little hands were shaded by fine frills. She looked, on the
whole, like a disenchanted lingerer in the living world, a useless
creature for whom fostering had done so much that you might ask: "What
is this illustration of a clean old woman? What is it for? What does it
teach?"

Esther, with her telegram, stood beside the bed.

"Grandmother," said she, in the perfect tone she used toward her, clear
and not too loud, "Aunt Patricia Beattie is coming."

Grandmother lifted large black eyes dulled by the broken surface of age,
to Esther's face. There was no envy in the gaze but wonder chiefly.

"Is that youth?" the eyes inquired. "Useless, not especially
admirable--but curious."

Esther, waiting there for recognition, felt the discomfort grandmother
always seemed to stir into her mood. Her rose-touched skin was a little
more suffused, though not beyond a furtherance of beauty.

"Aunt Patricia is coming," she repeated. "When I heard from her last she
was in Poland."

"Her name is Martha," said grandmother. "Don't let her come in here."
She had a surprising voice, of a barbaric quality, the ring of metal.
Hearing it you were mentally translated for an instant, and thought of
far-off, palm-girt islands and savages beating strange instruments and
chanting to them uncouth syllables. "