Having adjusted the cushion, Winona paused before the cage of a parrot on a stand at the end of the porch.  The bird sidled over to her on stiff legs, cocked upon her a leering, yellow eye and said in wheedling tones, “Pretty girl, pretty girl!” But then it harshly screeched, “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!” This laughter was discordant, cynical, derisive, as if the bird relished a tasteless jest.

Winona went to the hammock and resumed an open book.  Its title was “Matthew Arnold—­How to Know Him.”  She was getting up in Matthew Arnold for a paper.  Winona at twenty was old before she should have been.  She was small and dark, with a thin nose and pinched features.  Her dark hair, wound close to her small head, was pretty enough, and her dark eyes were good, but she seemed to carry almost the years of her mother.  She was an earnest girl, severe in thought, concerned about her culture, seeking to subdue a nature which she profoundly distrusted to an ideal she would have described as one of elegance and refinement.  The dress she wore was one of her best—­for an exemplary young man would call that evening, bringing his choice silver flute upon which he would play justly if not brilliantly to Winona’s piano accompaniment—­but it was dull of tint, one of her mother’s plain, not fancy, creations.  Still Winona felt it was daring, because the collar was low and sported a fichu of lace.  This troubled her, even as she renewed the earnest effort to know Matthew Arnold.  She doubtfully fingered at her throat a tiny chain that supported a tiny pendant.  She slipped the thing under the neck of her waist.  She feared that with her low neck—­she thought of it as low—­the bauble would be flashy.

Mrs. Penniman came from the kitchen and sat on the porch steps.  She was much like Winona, except that certain professional touches of colour at waist, neck, and wrists made her appear, in spirit at least, the younger woman.  There were times when Winona suffered herself to doubt her mother’s seriousness; times when the woman appeared a slave to levity.  She would laugh at things Winona considered no laughing matters, and her sympathy with her ailing husband had come to be callous and matter of fact, almost perfunctory.  She longed, moreover, to do fancy dressmaking for her child; and there was the matter of the silk stockings.  The Christmas before the too downright Dave Cowan, in a low spirit of banter, had gifted Winona with these.  They were of tan silk, and Dave had challenged her to wear them for the good of her soul.

Winona had been quite unpleasantly shocked at Dave’s indelicacy, but her mother had been frivolous throughout the affair.  Her mother said, too, that she would like to wear silk stockings at all times.  But Winona—­she spoke of the gift as hose—­put the sinister things away at the bottom of her third bureau drawer.  Once, indeed, she had nearly nerved herself to a public appearance in them, knowing that perfectly good women often did this.  That had been the day she was to read her paper on Early Greek Sculpture at the Entre Nous Club.  She had put them on with her new tan pumps, but the effect had been too daring.  She felt the ogling eyes.  The stockings had gone back to the third bureau drawer—­to the bottom—­and never had her ankles flashed a silken challenge to a public that might misunderstand.