In the mornings, Mary Alice helped her mother with the housework.  In the afternoons, after the midday dinner was cleared away, Mary Alice had a good deal of time on her hands.  Sometimes she sewed—­made new clothes or remade old ones; sometimes she read.  Once in a while she took some fancy work and went to see a girl friend, or a girl friend brought some fancy work and came to see her.  Occasionally she and another girl went for a walk.  Semi-occasionally there was a church social or a sewing circle luncheon, or somebody gave a party.

Somebody had given a party to-day, and Mary Alice had gone to it with high hope of finding it “interesting” and had come away from it with a deep despair of ever finding in life that which would make the monotony of it worth while.

Many another girl, feeling as Mary Alice did, would have gone away from home seeking “life” in a big city.  But Mary Alice, besides having no qualifications for earning her way in a big city, had a most unhappy shyness.  She was literally afraid of strangers, and never got very well acquainted even with persons she had associated with for a long time.

At the party to-day—­it was an afternoon tea—­Mary Alice had been more bitterly conscious than ever before of her lack of charms and the bleak prospect that lack entailed upon her.  For the tea was given for a girl who was visiting in town, a girl of a sort Mary Alice had never seen before.  She was pretty, that visiting girl, and she was sweet; she had a charm that was irresistible; she seemed to like everybody, and there was no mistake about everybody liking her.  Even the town girls liked her and were not jealous.  Even Mary Alice liked her, and was not afraid of her.  But there she was—­that girl!—­vital, radiant, an example of what life might be, at twenty.  And Mary Alice came away hating as she had never done before, life as it was for her and as it promised to continue.

Presently she withdrew her head from the pillow and lay looking into the dark where, as we all know, the things that might be, that should have been, shape themselves so much more readily than in any light.  And, lying there, Mary Alice wondered if there were any fairy power on earth that could make of her a being half so sweet as that girl she had seen this afternoon.

Then she heard her mother open the sitting-room door and call her.  It was time to get their simple supper ready.

“In a minute!” she called back.  “I’m changing my dress.”  And she jerked at the hooks of her blue taffeta “jumper dress” with uncareful haste; bathed her face in cold water; put on her dark red serge which had been “good” last year; and went down-stairs to help her mother.