“Oh, pshaw! that’s the way it ought to be,” she would say to herself.  “But if he won’t—­I wonder whether I ever could have the brass to do it?  I don’t know why I shouldn’t.  We are both human.  Bott wouldn’t have said that if there was nothing in it, and he’s a mighty smart man.”

The night usually gave her courage.  Gazing into her glass, she saw enough to inspire her with an idea of her own invincibility; and after she had grown warm in bed she would doze away, resolving with a stout heart that she would try her fate in the morning.  But when day came, the enterprise no longer seemed so simple.  Her scanty wardrobe struck her with cowardice as she surveyed it.  The broad daylight made everything in the house seem poor and shabby.  When she went down-stairs, her heart sank within her as she entered the kitchen to help her mother, and when she sat with the family at the breakfast-table, she had no faith left in her dreams of the rosy midnight.  This alternation of feeling bred in her, in the course of a few days, a sort of fever, which lent a singular beauty to her face, and a petulant tang to her speech.  She rose one morning, after a sleepless night, in a state of anger and excitement in which she had little difficulty in charging upon Farnham all responsibility for her trouble of mind.

“I won’t stand it any longer,” she said aloud in her chamber.  “I shall go to him this day and have it out.  I shall ask him what he means by treating me so.”

She sat down by her bureau and began to crimp her hair with grim resolution.  Her mother came and knocked at her door.  “I’m not coming to breakfast, I’ve got a headache,” she said, and added to herself, “I sha’n’t go down and get the smell of bacon on me this morning.”

She continued her work of personal adornment for two hours, going several times over her whole modest arsenal of finery before she was ready for the fray.  She then went down in her street costume, and made a hasty meal of bread and butter, standing by the pantry.  Her mother came in and found her there.

“Why, Mattie, how’s your head?”

“I’m going to take a walk and see what that will do.”

As she walked rapidly out of Dean Street, the great clock of the cathedral was striking the hour of nine.

“Goodness!” she exclaimed, “that’s too early to call on a gentleman.  What shall I do?”

She concluded to spend the time of waiting in the library, and walked rapidly in that direction, the fresh air flushing her cheeks, and blowing the frizzed hair prettily about her temples.  She went straight to the reference rooms, and sat down to read a magazine.  The girl who had prompted her to apply for a place was there on duty.  She gave a little cry of delight when she saw Maud, and said: 

“I was just crazy to see you.  I have got a great secret for you.  I’m engaged!”

The girls kissed each other with giggles and little screams, and the young woman told who he was—­in the lightning-rod business in Kalamazoo, and doing very well; they were to be married almost immediately.