“Well, what did you see in New York, Maria?” asked Harry, pleasantly.

“I saw the greatest lot of folks without manners, that I ever saw in my whole life,” replied Aunt Maria, sharply.

Harry Edgham laughed.  “You’ll get used to it,” he said, easily.  “Everybody who comes from New England has to take time to like New York.  It is an acquired taste.”

“When I do acquire it, I’ll be equal to any of them,” replied Aunt Maria.  “When I lose my temper, they had better look out.”

Harry Edgham laughed again.

It was the next morning when Aunt Maria appeared at the early breakfast with a pompadour.  Her thin frizzes were carefully puffed over a mystery which she had purchased the afternoon before.

Maria, when she first saw her aunt, stared open-mouthed; then she ate her breakfast as if she had seen nothing.

Harry Edgham gave one sharp stare at his sister-in-law, then he said:  “Got your hair done up a new way, haven’t you, Maria?”

“Yes, my hat didn’t set well on my head with my hair the way I was wearing it,” replied Aunt Maria with dignity; still she blushed.  She knew that her own hair did not entirely conceal the under structure, and she knew, too, why she wore the pompadour.

Harry Edgham recognized the first fact with simple pity that his sister-in-law’s hair was so thin.  He remembered hearing a hair-tonic recommended by another man in the office, and he wondered privately if Maria would feel hurt if he brought some for her.  Of the other fact he had not the least suspicion.  He said:  “Well, it’s real becoming to you, Maria.  I guess I like it better than the other way.  I notice all the girls seem to wear their hair so nowadays.”

Aunt Maria smiled at him gratefully.  When her sister had married him, she had wondered what on earth she saw in Harry Edgham; now he seemed to her a very likeable man.

When Maria sat in school that morning, her aunt’s pompadour diverted her mind from her book; then she caught Gladys Mann’s wondering eyes upon her, and she studied again.

While Maria could scarcely be said to have an intimate friend at school, a little girl is a monstrosity who has neither a friend nor a disciple; she had her disciple, whose name was Gladys Mann.  Gladys was herself a little outside the pale.  Most of her father’s earnings went for drink, and Gladys’s mother was openly known to take in washing to make both ends meet, and keep the girl at school at all; moreover, she herself came of one of the poor white families which flourish in New Jersey as well as at the South, although in less numbers.  Gladys’s mother was rather a marvel, inasmuch as she was willing to take in washing, and do it well too, but Gladys had no higher rank for that.  She was herself rather a pathetic little soul, dingily pretty, using the patois of her kind, and always at the fag end of her classes.  Her education, so far, seemed to meet with no practical results in the child herself.  Her brain merely filtered learning like a sieve; but she thought Maria Edgham was a wonder, and it was really through her, and her alone, that she obtained any education.