entrance of the lodging-house and up the narrow
stairs, saturated with obsolete smells--smells of dead dinners--to the
very instant when she opened the upper door and faced bald reality and
her mother. Mrs. Quincy sat by the window in a room on the walls of
which the word "shabby" was written in a handwriting as plain, and in
language far simpler than ever Belshazzar saw on the walls of Babylon.
It fairly cried itself from the big-figured paper, peeling along its
edges; from the worn painted floor; from the frayed rug of now
patternless carpet; from the sideboard that looked like a parlor organ.
Even from the closet door it whispered that there was more shabbiness
hidden in the depths.

Mrs. Quincy herself was a part of it, for she was to Lena what the faded
rose is to the opening one, a once beautiful woman, whose skin now
looked like wrinkled cream.

Lena shut the door and came in without speaking. She flung her hat and
coat on the bed in the corner, where a forlorn counterpane showed by the
hollows and hills beneath that it had given up all attempt to play even.
The girl sat down listlessly with her hands in her lap.

"You've been gone a long time, Lena," said the mother in a delicately
querulous voice. "You're fortunate to be able to get out instead of
being cooped up in this little room the way I am." Mrs. Quincy coughed
with conscious pathos. "I sometimes wonder if you ever think of your
poor mother and how lonely she is most of the time. But I'd ought to be
used to people's always forgetting me."

"Much I have to come home to!" Lena answered. "You're about as cheerful
as barbed wire. But you can comfort yourself! I shan't be able to go
out at all much longer, any way."

"Why, what's the matter now?"

"Do you expect me to wear a felt hat all summer?" Lena asked sharply.
"I'm ashamed to be seen in that old thing and I should think you'd be
ashamed to be so stingy with me."

Her mother sighed and lapsed into the creaking comfort of her
rocking-chair.

"I ain't stingy," she said at last. "But if you had your way you'd spend
every last cent of the pension the very day it comes. I've got to look
out we don't starve. If you'd only make up your mind to work and earn a
little instead of livin' so pinched! I'm sure I'd work if I could. But
there! there ain't nothing for me to do but to set and suffer, and
nobody knows what I endure."

"I wasn't born to be a working girl," said Lena sullenly. "I've got the
bloo