e let you grow
up! Why, it would take half a month's salary to reproduce these
curtains. I got them at a great bargain--but even then I couldn't afford
them. Ralph was furious."

"You could buy muslin curtains that would be just as pretty," suggested
Lydia.

"Why, those curtains are the only things with the least distinction in
my whole parlor! They _save_ the room."

"From what?"

"From showing that there's almost nothing in it that cost anything, to
be sure! With them at the window, it would never enter people's heads to
think that I upholstered the furniture myself, or that the pictures
are--"

"Why shouldn't they think so, if you did?" Lydia proffered this
suggestion with an air of fatigued listlessness, which, her sister
thought, showed that she made it "simply to be contrary." Acting on this
theory, she answered it with a dignified silence.

There was a pause. Lydia tilted her head back against the chair, and
looked out of the window at the new green leaves of the piazza vine.
Mrs. Mortimer's thin, white, rather large hands drew the shining little
needle back and forth with a steady, hurrying industry. It came into her
mind that their respective attitudes were symbolical of their lives,
and she thought, glancing at Lydia's drooping depression, that it would
be better for her if she were obliged to work more. "Work," of course,
meant to Marietta those forms of activity which filled her own life.
"_I_ never have any time for notions," she thought, the desperate,
hurrying, straining routine of her days rising before her and moving
her, as always, to rebellion and yet to a martyr's pride.

Lydia stirred from her listless pose and came over to her sister,
sitting down on a stool at her feet. "Marietta, dear, please let me talk
to you. I'm so miserable these days--and Mother won't let me say a word
to her. She says it's spring fever, and being engaged, and the end of
the season, and everything. Please, _please_ be serious, and let me tell
you about it, and see if you can't help me."

Her tone was so broken and imploring that Mrs. Mortimer was startled.
She was, moreover, flattered that Lydia should come to her for advice
rather than to her parents. She put her arm around her sister's
shoulders, and said gently, "Why, yes, dear; of course; anything--"

"Then stop sewing and listen to me--"

"But I can sew and listen, too."

"Oh, Etta, _please_! That's just the kind of thing that gets me so wild.
Just a lit