“How awful good you are, sister!” said little Evelyn, and Maria quite agreed with her.  The conviction of her own goodness, and her forthcoming power to exercise it, filled her soul with a gentle, stimulating warmth after she was in bed.  The moonlight shone brightly into her room.  She gazed at the bright shaft of silver it made across all her familiar possessions, and, notwithstanding her young girl dreams were gone, she realized that, although she had lost all the usual celestial dreams and rafters of romance which go to make a young girl’s air-castle, she had still left some material, even if of less importance.

She spent, on the whole, a very happy summer.  Her father looked entirely well; she was busy in preparations for her life in Amity; and, what relieved her the most, Wollaston Lee was not at home for more than five days during the entire vacation.  He went camping-out with a party of college-boys.  Maria was, therefore, not subjected to the nervous strain of seeing him.  During the few days he was at home he had his chum with him, and Maria only saw him twice—­once on the street, when she returned his bow distantly and heard with no pleasure the other boy ask who that pretty girl was, and once in church.  She gave only the merest side-glance at him in church, and she was not sure that he looked at her at all, but she went home pale and nervous.  A secret of any kind is a hard thing for a girl to bear about with her, and Maria’s, which was both tragic and absurd, was severer than most.  At times it seemed to her, when she looked in her glass, that all she saw was the secret; it seemed to her, when other people looked at her, that it was all they saw.  It was one reason for her readiness to go to Amity.  She would there be out of reach of people who could in any way have penetrated her secret.  She would not run the risk of meeting Wollaston; of meeting his father and mother, and wondering if he had, after all, told; of meeting Gladys Mann, and wondering if she had told, and knowing that she knew.

Maria, in these last months, saw very little of Gladys, who had sunken entirely into the lower stratum of society in which she belonged.  Gladys had left school, where she had not learned much, and she went out cleaning and doing house-work, at seventy-five cents a day.  Sometimes Maria met her going to and fro from a place of employment, and at such times there was fear in Maria’s face and a pathetic admiration and reassurance in the other girl’s.  Gladys had grown hard and large as to her bones and muscles, but she did not look altogether well.  She had a half-nourished, spiritually and bodily, expression, which did not belie the true state of affairs with her.  She had neither enough meat nor enough ideality.  She was suffering, and the more because she did not know.  Gladys was of the opinion that she was, on the whole, enjoying life and having a pretty good time.  She earned enough to buy herself some showy clothes, and she had a lover, a “steady,” as she called him.  It is true that she was at times a little harassed by jealousy concerning another girl who had a more fully blown beauty than she, and upon whom she sometimes suspected her lover was casting admiring eyes.