“Oh yes, I know how.  Don’t you worry about me,” said Maria, turning up her aunt’s creaseless black silk skirt gingerly.  It was rather incomprehensible to her that anybody should care so much whether a black silk skirt was creased or not, when the terrible undertone of emotions which underline the world, and are its creative motive, were in existence, but Maria was learning gradually to be patient with the small worries of others which seemed large to them, and upon which she herself could not place much stress.  She stood at the window, when her aunt at last emerged from the house, and picked her way through the light snow, and her mouth twitched a little at the absurd, shapeless figure.  Her Aunt Eunice had joined her, and she was not so shapeless.  She held up her dress quite fashionably on one side, with a rather generous display of slender legs.  Aunt Maria did not consider that her sister-in-law was quite careful enough of her clothes.  “Henry won’t always be earning,” she often said to Maria.  To-day she had eyed with disapproval Eunice’s best black silk trailing from under her cape, when she entered the sitting-room.  She had come through the cellar.

“Are you going that way, in such a storm, in your best black silk?” she inquired.

“I haven’t any water-proof,” replied Eunice, “and I don’t see what else I can do.”

“You might wear my old shawl spread out.”

“I wouldn’t go through the street cutting such a figure,” said Eunice, with one of her occasional bursts of spirit.  She was delighted to go.  Nobody knew how this meek, elderly woman loved a little excitement.  There were red spots on her thin cheeks, and she looked almost as if she had used rouge.  Her eyes snapped.

“I should think you would turn your skirt up, anyway,” said Aunt Maria.  “You’ve got your black petticoat on, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” replied Eunice.  “But if you think I am going right through the Main Street in my petticoat, you are mistaken.  Snow won’t hurt the silk any.  It’s a dry snow, and it will shake right off.”

So Eunice, at the side of Aunt Maria, went with her dress kilted high, and looked as preternaturally slim as her sister-in-law looked stout.  Maria, watching them, thought how funny they were.  She herself was elemental, and they, in their desires and interests, were like motes floating on the face of the waters.  Maria, while she had always like pretty clothes, had come to a pass wherein she relegated them to their proper place.  She recognized many things as externals which she had heretofore considered as essentials.  She had developed wonderfully in a few months.  As she turned away from the window she caught a glimpse of Lily Merrill’s lovely face in a window of the opposite house, above a mass of potted geraniums.  Lily nodded, and smiled, and Maria nodded back again.  Her heart sank at the idea of Lily’s coming that evening, a sickening jealous dread of the confidence which she was to make to her was over her, and yet she said to herself that she had no right to have this dread.  She prepared her supper and ate it, and had hardly cleared away the table and washed the dishes before Lily came flying across the yard before the storm-wind.  Maria hurried to the door to let her in.