personal sense. She knew that her destiny as a woman had been
unfulfilled, but she would rather have killed herself than pitied
herself. She was as hard to herself and her own possible weakness as
she was to anybody on earth, possibly harder. She cheated the
dressmaker, she ate at the expense of others, as she would have
cheated herself had she known how. It did not occur to her to go
without anything which she could by any means get; not because she
wanted it so keenly, as from another phase of the same feeling which
had led Minna Eddy to appropriate the rug, and Estella Griggs the
paraphernalia of the tea-table and the sofa-pillow. She had herself
been duped in a larger sense; she was a creditor of Providence. She
considered that she had a right to her hard wages of mere existence,
when they came in her way, were they in the form of red silk gowns or
anything else. She would admit no wrong in her brother, for the same
reason, reserving only the right to condemn him at times on the boy's
account. She began thinking about the boy as she went on with her
preparations for bed. Her face lit up a little as she reflected upon
the benefit it might be to Eddy to be in Kentucky. She thought of the
dire possibility of serious complications for Arthur in this
culminating crisis of his affairs.

"Better for the child to be out of it," she said to herself, and that
singular anger with Arthur for the sake of the boy, which was like
anger with him for his own sake, came over her. She identified the
two. She saw in Eddy the epitome of his father, the inheritor of his
virtues and faults, and his retribution, his heir-at-large by the
inscrutable and merciless law of heredity. "Yes, it is better for
Eddy to be out of it," she repeated to herself, with the same
reasoning that she might have used had she been proposing to separate
her brother's better self from his worse. But she resolved more
firmly that she would not go herself. She would urge the others'
going, but she would remain.

Chapter XXXI

But in spite of Anna Carroll's resolve, she went to Kentucky with the
others in two weeks' time. She had had quite a severe attack of
illness after that night, and it had left her so weakened in body
that she had not strength to stand against her brother's urging.
Then, too, Mrs. Carroll had displayed an unexpected reluctance to
leave. She had evinced a totally new phase of her character, as
people who are unconquerable children al