usual
train.

For a long time after he had left the house Nannie sat there, her
breakfast untasted, her elbows resting on the table, her hands clasped
under her chin. She was not looking at the violets, but their subtle
fragrance permeated her thought as it were. Never in all her life
before had she been treated in this way; never before had she known of
anything of this kind outside the covers of a book. She was not
conscious of shame, sorrow, or even regret; she was simply stupid with
wonder.

She got up by-and-by and walked toward the parlor, but looking back to
the table she saw the violets still lying beside her plate. She
hesitated a moment, then took them up and carried them to a vase in
the next room, but in the midst of arranging them there she
impulsively turned to a magazine near at hand, slipped them into
this, and then tucked the book away, coloring the while like a girl
detected with her first love letter.

"It wasn't so dreadful what I did," she muttered, to reinstate
herself. "It didn't matter about the radishes, anyhow. They were so
old it would have been disrespectful to eat them."

But she felt badly, nevertheless, as she caught up her hat, which lay
upon the sofa just where she had thrown it the night before, and
started off to Constance Chance's.

Something was stirred within her, and she felt uneasy with a
restlessness that inclined her to seek a friend.

A friend! She had not one in the world. Of all the women she knew,
Constance Chance claimed the most of her respect and admiration, but
Constance was wholly unaware of this feeling, and moreover, did not
like Nannie. In old days she tolerated her and was even attracted by
her beauty, but she had warmly resented her marriage to Steve--whom
she regarded as deserving a wife far superior to Nannie. She had, as
is the custom of women in such cases, leaped to the conclusion that
either Nannie had made advances to Steve--which he was too delicate
and kind-hearted to repel--or that she had in some way excited his
pity, and he had married her in order to protect and care for her, and
she held it as a grudge against her. That a man like Steve could be
attracted by such a girl as Nannie was inconceivable to Constance,
although Randolph regarded the matter differently.

When she found that the marriage really was to take place she resolved
to make the best of it, but it was not long before she decided that
Steve was unhappy, and then her smoulderin