o’clock to take her to Florrie’s party, and she told herself with grim determination that she would never go to a party again.  The Berkeley conscience, that vein of iron which lay beneath the outward softness and incompetence of her mother and sister, held her, in spite of her tempting youth, to the resolution she had made.  She had told Jimmy that she meant to earn her living if she had to break rocks to do it, and Gabriella, like Pussy, came of a race that “did not easily change its mind.”

Turning to the bureau, she smoothed out the children’s hair ribbons and pinned them, in two tight little blue and pink rolls, to the pincushion.  Then taking up a broken comb, she ran it through the soft lock of hair that fell like a brown wing over her forehead.  Her bright dark eyes, fringed in short thick lashes and set wide apart under arched eyebrows, gazed questioningly back at her from a row of german favours with which she had decorated the glass; and it was as if the face of youth, flickering with a flamelike glow and intensity, swam there for an instant in the dim greenish pool of the mirror.  Beneath the charm of the face there was the character which one associates, not with youth, but with age and experience.  Beneath the fine, clear lines of her head and limbs, the tall slenderness of her figure, the look of swiftness and of energy, which was almost birdlike in its grace and poise, there was a strength and vigour which suggested a gallant boy rather than the slighter and softer frame of a girl.

While she stood there, Gabriella thought regretfully of all that it would mean to give up her half-dependent and wholly ladylike existence and go to work in a shop.  Necessity not choice was driving her; and in spirit she looked back almost wistfully to the securely circumscribed lot of her grandmother.  For there was little of the rebel in her temperament; and had she been free to choose, she would have instinctively selected, guided by generations of gregarious ancestors, the festive girlhood which Cousin Pussy had so ardently described.  She wanted passionately all the things that other girls had, and her only quarrel, indeed, with the sheltered life was that she couldn’t afford it.  In the expressive phrase of Cousin Jimmy, the sheltered life “cost money,” and to cost money was to be beyond the eager grasp of Gabriella.

The door opened as if yielding under protest, and Marthy entered, still hurriedly tying the strings of the clean apron she had slipped on over her soiled one before answering the door-bell.

“Yo’ beau done come, Miss Ella.  Ain’t you gwine?”

“No, I’m not going to the party, Marthy, but ask him to wait just a minute.”

“He’s settin’ over yonder in de parlour wid his overcoat on.”

“Well, ask him to take it off; I’ll be there in a moment.”  She spoke as gravely as Marthy had done, yet in her face there was a light play of humour.