“I suppose she’ll get over it.  She gets over everything,” she had said to Miss Polly, drawing painful comfort from the shallowness and insincerity of Fanny’s nature, “but something dreadful might happen while she is in one of her moods.”

“Not with Fanny,” Miss Polly had replied reassuringly.  “Fanny knows more already than you and I put together, and she’s got about as much red blood as a lemon.  She ain’t the sort that things happen to, so don’t you begin to worry about her.  She’s got mighty little sense, that’s the gospel truth, but the little she’s got has been sharpened down to a p’int.”

“I can’t help feeling that she hasn’t been well brought up.  I did what I could, but she needed more time and care than I could give her.  It wasn’t, of course, as if I’d chosen to neglect her.  I have been obliged to work or she would have starved.”

“Oh, well, I wouldn’t bother about that.  It’s like wishing chickens back in the shell after they’re hatched—­there ain’t a particle of use in it.  If you ask me what I think—­then, I’d say that Fanny would be just exactly what she is if you’d raised her down yonder in Virginia.  Her father’s in her as well as you, and it seems to me that she grows more like him every day that she lives.  Now, Archibald is your child, anybody can tell that at a glance.  It’s queer, ain’t it how the boys almost always seem to take after the mother?”

“But Charley has a splendid daughter.  Think of his Margaret.”

“Of course, there ain’t any rule that works out every time; but you know, I’ll always take up for Mr. Charley if it’s with the last breath I draw.  It ain’t always the woman that gets the worst of marriage, though to hear some people talk you’d think it was nothin’ but turkey and plum puddin’ for men.  But it ain’t, I don’t care who says so, and if anybody but a saint could have married Jane without takin’ to drink, I’d like to have seen him try it, that’s all.”

That was three weeks ago, and to-night, while Fanny rattled on about the house in West Twenty-third Street, her mother watched her with a tolerant affection in which there was neither admiration nor pride.  She was not deluded about Fanny’s character, though the maternal mote in her eye obscured her critical vision of her appearance.  But, notwithstanding the fact that she thought Fanny beautiful, she was clearly aware that the girl had never been, since she left the cradle, anything but a source of anxiety; and for the last week or two Gabriella had been more than usually worried about her infatuation for the matinée idol.  In spite of Miss Polly’s assurances that Fanny was too calculating for rash adventures, Gabriella had spent several sleepless nights over the remote possibility of an entanglement, and her anxiety was heightened by the fact that the child told her nothing.  They were so different that there was little real sympathy between them, and confidences from daughter to mother must spring, she knew, from