It had begun, this first piercing contact of reality, rudely enough.  Mrs. Hudson had helped to split the protecting shell which had saved Sheila’s growing dreams.  Perhaps “Momma” had her instructions, perhaps it was only her own disposition left by her knowing husband to do his trick for him.  Sheila had not overstated the unhappiness that Mrs. Hudson’s evident dislike had caused her.  In fact, she had greatly understated it.  From the first moment at the station, when the hard eyes had looked her over and the harsh voice had asked about “the girl’s trunk,” Sheila’s sensitiveness had begun to suffer.  It was not easy, even with Babe’s good-humored help, to go down into the kitchen and submit to Mrs. Hudson’s hectoring.  “Momma” had all the insolence of the underdog.  Of her daughters, as of her husband, she was very much afraid.  They all bullied her, Babe with noisy, cheerful effrontery—­“sass” Sylvester called it—­and Girlie with a soft, unyielding tyranny that had the smothering pressure of a large silk pillow.  Girlie was tall and serious and beautiful, the proud possessor of what Millings called “a perfect form.”  She was inexpressibly slow and untidy, vain and ignorant and self-absorbed.  At this time her whole being was centered upon the attentions of Jim Greely, with whom she was “keeping company.”  With Jim Greely in her mind, she had looked Sheila over, thin and weary Sheila in her shabby black dress, and had decided that here no danger threatened.  Nevertheless she did not take chances.  Sheila had been in Millings a fortnight and had not met the admirable Jim.  Her attempt that morning to send the note to Dickie by Jim was exactly the action that led to the painful splitting of her shell.

She had seen from her window Sylvester’s departure after breakfast.  There was something in his grim, angular figure, moving carefully over the icy pavement in the direction of the hotel, that gave her a pang for Dickie.  She was sure that Hudson was going to be very disagreeable in spite of her attempt to soften his anger.  And she was sorry that Dickie, with his odd, wistful, friendly face and his eyes so wide and youthful and apologetic for their visions, should think that she was angry or disgusted.  She wrote her letter in a little glow of rescue, and was proud of the tact of that reference to his “fall down the steps”—­for she reasoned that the self-esteem of any boy of nineteen must suffer poignantly over the memory of being knocked down by his father before the eyes of a strange girl.  She wrote her note and ran down the stairs, then stopped to wonder how she could get it promptly to Dickie.  It was intended as a poultice to be applied after the “bawling-out,” and she could not very well take it to him herself.  She knew that he worked in the hotel, and the hotel was just around the corner.  All that was needed was a messenger.

She was standing, pink of cheek and vague of eye, fingering her apron like a cottage child and nibbling at the corner of her envelope, the light from a window on the stairs falling on the jewel-like polish of her hair, when Girlie opened the door of the “parlor” and came out into the hall.  Girlie saw her and half-closed the door.  Her lazy eyes, as reflective and receptive and inexpressive as small meadow pools under a summer sky, rested upon Sheila.  In the parlor a pleasant baritone voice was singing,