which would travel from her neatly shod feet up to her hair, frizzed and banged down to her eyebrows, “making her look,” he thought, “more like a Scotch poodle-dog than an honest girl.”  He hated those books which, he fancied, stole away her heart from her home.  He had once picked up one of them where she had left it; but the high-flown style seemed as senseless to him as the words of an incantation, and he had flung it down more bewildered than ever.  He thought there must be some strange difference between their minds when she could delight in what seemed so uncanny to him, and he gazed at her, reading by the lamp-light, as over a great gulf.  Even her hands holding the book made him uneasy; for since she had grown careful of them, they were like no hands he had ever seen on any of his kith and kin.  The fingers were long and white, and the nails were shaped like an almond, and though the hands lacked delicacy at the articulations, they almost made Matchin reverence his daughter as his superior, as he looked at his own.

One evening, irritated by the silence and his own thoughts, he cried out with a sudden suspicion: 

“Where do you git all them books, and what do they cost?”

She turned her fine eyes slowly upon him and said: 

“I get them from the public library, and they cost nothing.”

He felt deeply humiliated that he should have made a blunder so ridiculous and so unnecessary.

After she had left the school—­where she was graduated as near as possible to the foot of the class—­she was almost alone in the world.  She rarely visited her sister, for the penury of the Wixham household grated upon her nerves, and she was not polite enough to repress her disgust at the affectionate demonstrations of the Wixham babies.  “There, there! get along, you’ll leave me not fit to be seen!” she would say, and Jurilda would answer in that vicious whine of light-haired women, too early overworked and overprolific:  “Yes, honey, let your aunt alone.  She’s too tiffy for poor folks like us”; and Maud would go home, loathing her lineage.

The girls she had known in her own quarter were by this time earning their own living:  some in the manufactories, in the lighter forms of the iron trade, some in shops, and a few in domestic service.  These last were very few, for the American blood revolts against this easiest and best-paid of all occupations, and leaves it to more sensible foreigners.  The working bees were clearly no company for this poor would-be butterfly.  They barely spoke when they met, kept asunder by a mutual embarrassment.  One girl with whom she had played as a child had early taken to evil courses.  Her she met one day in the street, and the bedraggled and painted creature called her by her name.

“How dare you?” said Maud, shocked and frightened.

“All right!” said the shameless woman.  “You looked so gay, I didn’t know.”

Maud, as she walked away, hardly knew whether to be pleased or not.  “She saw I looked like a lady, and thought I could not be one honestly.  I’ll show them!”