uld also hear how her innocent kindness had been misconstrued;
and in each case she could imagine the conversation that took place, and
the subsequent bestowal of pitying, scornful or angry feeling that would
insensibly find its way to her consciousness without any bird of the air
to carry it.

She felt, too, that reprisals of any kind were out of the question. They
were not only impolitic, they were difficult. Her father had an aversion
to Dora, and was likely to seize the first opportunity for requesting
Ethel to drop the girl's acquaintance. Ruth also had urged her to
withdraw from any active part in the wedding, strengthening her advice
with the assurance that when a friendship began to decline it ought to
be abandoned at once. There was only her grandmother to go to, and at
first she did not find her at all interested in the trouble. She had
just had a dispute with her milkman, was inclined to give him all her
suspicions and all her angry words--"an impertinent, cheating creature,"
she said; and then Ethel had to hear the history of the month's cream
and of the milkman's extortion, with the old lady's characteristic
declaration:

"I told him plain what I thought of his ways, but I paid him every cent
I owed him. Thank God, I am not unreasonable!"

Neither was she unreasonable when Ethel finally got her to listen to her
own serious grievance with Dora.

"If you will have a woman for a friend, Ethel, you must put up with
womanly ways; and it is best to keep your mouth shut concerning such
ways. I hate to see you whimpering and whining about wrongs you have
been cordially inviting for weeks and months and years."

"Grandmother!"

"Yes, you have been sowing thorns for yourself, and then you go unshod
over them. I mean that Dora has this fine clergyman, and Fred Mostyn,
and her brother, and mother, and father all on her side; all of them
sure that Dora can do no wrong, all of them sure that Ethel, poor girl,
must be mistaken, or prudish, or jealous, or envious."

"Oh, grandmother, you are too cruel."

"Why didn't you have a few friends on your own side?"

"Father and Ruth never liked Dora. And Fred--I told you how Fred acted
as soon as he saw her!"

"There was Royal Wheelock, James Clifton, or that handsome Dick Potter.
Why didn't you ask them to join you at your lunches and dances? You
ought to have pillared your own side. A girl without her beaux is always
on the wrong side if the girl with beaux is agains