“I can’t,” said Maria, and a qualm of nausea came over her.  It was as if the damp, unclean garments and the wet shoes were pressed close under her nostrils.  She looked pale.

“Well, drink your tea, anyhow,” said Aunt Maria, with a glance at her.

After supper Aunt Maria, going into the other side of the house to borrow some yeast, said to her brother Henry that she did not believe that Maria would hold out to teach school.  “She has come home sick on account of the smells the very first day,” said she, “and she hasn’t eat her supper, and she scarcely touched her luncheon.”

Henry Stillman laughed, a bitter, sardonic laugh which he had acquired of late years.  “Oh, well, she will get used to it,” he replied.  “Don’t you worry, Maria.  She will get used to it.  The smell of the poor is the smell of the world.  Heaven itself must be full of it.”

His wife eyed him with a half-frightened air.  “Why, don’t talk so, Henry!” she said.

Henry Stillman laughed, half sardonically, half tenderly.  “It is so, my dear,” he said, “but don’t you worry about it.”

In these days Henry Stillman, although always maintaining his gentle manner towards children and women, had become, in the depths of his long-suffering heart, a rebel against fate.  He had borne too long that burden which is the heaviest and most ignoble in the world, the burden of a sense of injury.  He knew that he was fitted for better things than he had.  He thought that it was not his own personal fault that he did not have them, and his very soul was curdling with a conviction of wrong, both at the hands of men and God.  In these days he ceased going to church.  He watched his wife and sister set out every Sunday, and he stayed at home.  He got a certain satisfaction out of that.  All who realize an injury have an amount of childishness in acts of retaliation.  He, Henry Stillman, actually had a conviction that he was showing recrimination and wounding fate, which had so injured him, if only with a pin-prick, by staying away from church.  After Maria came to live with them, she, too, went to church, but he did not view her with the same sardonic air that he did the older women, who had remained true to their faith in the face of disaster.  He looked at Maria, in her pretty little best gowns and hats, setting forth, and a sweet tenderness for her love of God and belief sweetened his own agnosticism.  He would not for the world have said a word to weaken the girl’s faith nor to have kept her away from church.  He would have urged her to go had she manifested the slightest inclination to remain at home.  He was in a manner jealous of the girl’s losing what he had himself lost.  He tried to refrain from airing his morbid, bitter views of life to his wife, but once in a while he could not restrain himself as now.  However, he laughed so naturally, and asked Maria, who presently came in, how many pupils had been present, and how she liked school-teaching, that his wife began to think that he had not been in earnest.