me, there are in me _two_ Nancys--Barbara's
Nancy, and Roger's Nancy; the one so vexed, thwarted, and humiliated in
spirit, that she feels as if she never could laugh quite heartily again;
the other, so utterly and triumphantly glad, that any future tears or
trials seem to her in the highest degree improbable. And Barbara herself
is on the side of this latter. From her hopeful speech and her smiles,
you would think that some good news had come to her--that she was on the
eve of some long-looked-for, yet hardly-hoped prosperity. Not that she
is unnaturally or hysterically lively--an error into which many, making
such an effort and struggle for self-conquest, would fall. Barbara's
mirth was never noisy, as mine and the boys' so often was. Perhaps--nay,
I have often thought since, _certainly_--she weeps as she prays, in
secret; but God is the only One who knows of her tears, as of her
prayers. She has always been one to go halves in her pleasures, but of
her sorrows she will give never a morsel to any one.

Her very quietness under her trouble--her silence under it--her
equanimity--mislead me. It is the impulse of any hurt thing to cry out.
I, myself, have always done it. Half unconsciously, I am led by this
reasoning to think that Barbara's wound cannot be very deep, else would
she shrink and writhe beneath it. So I talk to her all day, with
merciless length, about Roger. I go through all the old queries. I again
critically examine my face, and arrive--not only at the former
conclusion, that one side is worse-looking than the other, but also that
it looks ten years older.

I have my flax hair built in many strange and differing fashions, and
again _un_built: piled high, to give me height; twisted low, in a vain
endeavor to liken me to the Greeks; curled, plaited, frizzed, and again
unfrizzed. I institute a searching and critical examination of my
wardrobe, rejecting this and that; holding one color against my cheek,
to see whether my pallor will be able to bear it; turning away from
another with a grimace of self-disgust.

And this is the same "_I_," who thought it so little worth while to win
the good opinion of father's blear-eyed old friend, that I went to my
first meeting with him with a scorched face, loose hair, tottering, all
through prayers, on the verge of a descent about my neck, and a large
round hole, smelling horribly of singeing, burnt in the very front of my
old woolen frock.

His coming is near now. Th