but Maria," he said to himself, and shut his mouth
hard. He resumed his attitude of obedience to duty, but one who is
driven by duty alone almost involuntarily balks in spirit.

Wollaston was conscious of balking, although he would not retreat.
When he saw Maria again after the exercises of the day were closed,
and he encountered her as she was leaving the academy, she looked
distinctly homely to him, and yet such was the honor of the man that
he did not in the least realize that the homeliness was an exterior
thing. It seemed to him that he saw her encompassed with the
stiffness of her New England antecedents, as with an armor, and that
he got a new and unlovely view of her character. On the contrary,
Evelyn's charming, half-smiling, half-piteous face turned towards him
seemed to afford glimpses of sweetest affections and womanly
gentleness and devotion. Evelyn wished to say that she was sorry that
they were obliged to refuse his invitation, but she did not dare.
Instead, she gave him that little, half-smiling, half-piteous glance,
to which he responded with a lighting up of his whole face and lift
of his hat. Then Evelyn smiled entirely, and her backward glance at
him was wonderfully alluring, yet maidenly, almost childish.
Wollaston, on his way home, thought again how different it would be
if Evelyn, instead of Maria, were his wife. Then he put it out of his
head resolutely.

The next morning Maria arranged her hair as usual. She had
comprehended that something more than mere externals were needful to
change the mind of a man like Wollaston, and she gave up the attempt,
it must be acknowledged, with a little pleasure. Feminine vanity was
inherent in Maria. Nobody knew what the making herself hideous the
day before had cost her.

"Oh, I am so glad you have done up your hair the old way," Evelyn
cried, when she saw her, and Aunt Maria remarked that she was glad to
see that she had not quite lost her common-sense.

Maria began herself to think that she had not evinced much sense in
her procedure of the day before. She had underestimated the character
of the man whom she had married, and had made herself ridiculous for
nothing. The boy who was infatuated with her, when he saw her on the
trolley that morning, made a movement to go forward and speak to her,
then he sat still with frequent puzzled glances at her. He was
repelled if Wollaston was not. This changing of the face of a woman
in a day's time filled him with