nient corner
of the room for her establishment. Social life became a round of
festivities when she kept house as my opposite neighbor. At last, after
the washing-day, and the baking-day, and the day when she took dinner with
me, and the day when we took our children and walked out together, came
the day for me to take my oldest child and go across to make a call at her
house. Chill discomfort struck me on the very threshold of my visit. Where
was the genial, laughing, talking lady who had been my friend up to that
moment? There she sat, stock-still, dumb, staring first at my bonnet, then
at my shawl, then at my gown, then at my feet; up and down, down and up,
she scanned me, barely replying in monosyllables to my attempts at
conversation; finally getting up, and coming nearer, and examining my
clothes, and my child's still more closely. A very few minutes of this
were more than I could bear; and, almost crying, I said, "Why, mamma, what
makes you do so?" Then the play was over; and she was once more the wise
and tender mother, telling me playfully that it was precisely in such a
way I had stared, the day before, at the clothes of two ladies who had
come in to visit her. I never needed that lesson again. To this day, if I
find myself departing from it for an instant, the old tingling shame burns
in my cheeks.

To this day, also, the old tingling pain burns my cheeks as I recall
certain rude and contemptuous words which were said to me when I was very
young, and stamped on my memory forever. I was once called a "stupid
child" in the presence of strangers. I had brought the wrong book from my
father's study. Nothing could be said to me to-day which would give me a
tenth part of the hopeless sense of degradation which came from those
words. Another time, on the arrival of an unexpected guest to dinner, I
was sent, in a great hurry, away from the table, to make room, with the
remark that "it was not of the least consequence about the child; she
could just as well have her dinner afterward." "The child" would have been
only too happy to help on the hospitality of the sudden emergency, if the
thing had been differently put; but the sting of having it put in that way
I never forgot. Yet in both these instances the rudeness was so small, in
comparison with what we habitually see, that it would be too trivial to
mention, except for the bearing of the fact that the pain it gave has
lasted till now.

When we consider seriously wha