raithwaite had lived till she was almost eighteen,
there had been a Principal Grocer. And Eva Atkinson had been his
daughter, not so very pretty, not so very pleasant, not so very clever,
and about six years older than Phyllis. Phyllis, as she tried vainly to
make her damp, straight hair go back the way it should, remembered
hearing that Eva had married and come to this city to live. She had
never heard where. And this had been Eva--Eva, by the grace of gold,
radiantly complexioned, wonderfully groomed, beautifully gowned, and
looking twenty-four, perhaps, at most: with a car and a placid
expression and _heaps_ of money, and pretty, clean children! The Liberry
Teacher, severely work-garbed and weather-draggled, jerked herself away
from the small greenish cloak-room mirror that was unkind to you at your
best.

She dashed down to the basement, harried by her usual panic-stricken
twenty-minutes-late feeling. She had only taken one glance at herself in
the wiggly mirror, but that one had been enough for her peace of mind,
supposing her to have had any left before. She felt as if she wanted to
break all the mirrors in the world, like the wicked queen in the French
fairy-tale.

Most people rather liked the face Phyllis saw in the mirror; but to her
own eyes, fresh from the dazzling vision of that Eva Atkinson who had
been dowdy and stupid in the far-back time when seventeen-year-old
Phyllis was "growin' up as pretty as a picture," the tired,
twenty-five-year-old, workaday face in the green glass was _dreadful_.
What made her feel worst--and she entertained the thought with a
whimsical consciousness of its impertinent vanity--was that she'd had so
much more raw material than Eva! And the world had given Eva a chance
because her father was rich. And she, Phyllis, was condemned to be tidy
and accurate, and no more, just because she had to earn her living. That
face in the greenish glass, looking tiredly back at her! She gave a
little out-loud cry of vexation now as she thought of it, two hours
later.

"I must have looked to Eva like a battered bisque doll--no wonder she
couldn't place me!" she muttered crossly.

And it must be worse and more of it now, because in the interval between
two and four there had been many little sticky fingers pulling at her
sleeves and skirt, and you just _have_ to cuddle dear little library
children, even when they're not extra clean; and when Vera Aronsohn
burst into heartbroken tears on the L