Dissatisfactions. Change.
The whole outlook was indescribably comfortless and depressing to her.
She felt something akin to the vague, apprehensive misery--beyond
reason or common sense--which people feel during the rumble of a
distant earthquake.

"I hate reading the papers," she said, flinging the sheet down.

"You shouldn't read the parts that worry you. I don't," said Mrs.
Bradford. "But you always were one to work yourself up about things.
I remember once how you fretted over some little newsboys with no
stockings on, when we went into Flodmouth as children to see the
pantomime. You worried yourself and everybody else to death. But they
were used to it, as dear father said, and it did them no harm. You are
of the worrying sort, Ethel, and you should try to hold yourself in."

"Poor world if nobody worried," said Miss Ethel; then she rose abruptly
and carried out the tea-tray.

Soon she was back again with a duster in her hand, beginning to dust
the large bookshelf, which had been overlooked for a day or two. As
her duster passed over the red-leather backs of the old bound volumes
of _Punch_ she saw with a wistful inner eye--as if she looked back to a
Promised Land on which the gate was shut for ever--that world of swells
and belles, of croquet and sunshine, of benevolence to the "poor" and
fingers touching forelocks, black being black and white white.

Then Mrs. Bradford spoke again. "Why not leave that dusting, Ethel?
You have been at it all day."

"Somebody must," said Miss Ethel, going on dusting.

"Well, I only wish I could do more," said Mrs. Bradford, comfortably
turning her page with a rustling crackle. "But my legs have given way
ever since I was married. I don't know why, I'm sure; but marriage
does seem to affect the constitution in queer ways."

Miss Ethel felt--as she was intended to feel--that it was not within
her power to comprehend the mysteries of the conjugal state; so
acquiescing from long habit in her sister's torpidity, she went on with
her dusting.

But her head ached appallingly, and she looked at the clock-hands
nearing five with a feeling that she could bear the sounds of building
so long and no longer. If they lasted a single minute beyond that time
something inside her head would snap. Knock--knock--knock;
scrape--scrape; the thud of something thrown down. She felt her breath
coming fast as she waited for the moment when her aching senses would
be lulled by the ces