Ida said. It
would once have aroused in her a contemptuous sense of her
step-mother's hypocrisy, but now she felt too humbled herself to
blame another, even to realize any fault in another. She felt as if
she had undergone a tremendous cataclysm of spirit, which had cast
her forever from her judgment-seat as far as others were concerned.
Was she not deceiving as never Ida had deceived? What would Ida say?
What would her father say if he knew that she was--? She could not
say the word even to herself. When she was in bed and her light out,
she was overcome by a nervous stress which almost maddened her. Faces
seemed to glower at her out of the blackness of the night, faces
which she knew were somehow projected out of her own consciousness,
but which were none the less terrific. She even heard her name
shouted, and strange, isolated words, and fragments of sentences. She
lay in a deadly fear. Now was the time when, if her own mother had
been alive, she would have screamed aloud for some aid. But now she
could call to no one. She would have spoken to her father. She would
not have told him--she was gripped too fast by her sense of the need
of secrecy--but she would have obtained the comfort and aid of his
presence and soothing words; but there was Ida. She remembered how
she had talked to Ida, and her father was with her. A dull wonder
even seized her as to whether Ida would tell her father, and she
should be allowed to remain at home after saying such dreadful
things. There was no one upon whom she could call. All at once she
thought of the maid Annie, whose room was directly over hers. Annie
was kindly. She would slip up-stairs to her, and make some excuse for
doing so--ask her if she did not smell smoke, or something. It seemed
to her that if she did not hear another human voice, come in contact
with something human, she should lose all control of herself.

Maria, little, slender, trembling girl, with all the hysterical
fancies of her sex crowding upon her, all the sufferings of her sex
waiting for her in the future, and with no mother to soften them,
slipped out of bed, stole across her room, and opened the door with
infinite caution. Then she went up the stairs which led to the third
story. Both maids had rooms on the third story. Josephine went home
at night, and Hannah, the cook, had gone home with her after the
return of the wanderers, and was to remain. She was related to
Josephine's mother. She knocked timidly a