shame seized her.  “He needn’t worry,” she thought.  “I wouldn’t have him, not if he was to go down on his knees in the dust.”  She told Gladys Mann that she thought Wollaston Lee was a very homely boy, and not so very smart, and Gladys told another girl whose brother knew Wollaston Lee, and he told him.  After a little, Wollaston and Maria never spoke when they met.  The girl did not seem to see the boy; she was more delicate in her manner of showing aversion, but the boy gazed straight at her with an insolent stare, as at one who had dared him.  He told the same boy who had told him what Maria had said, that he thought Amy Long was the prettiest girl in school, and Maria was homely enough to crack a looking-glass, and that came back to Maria.  Everything said in the school always came back, by some mysterious law of gravitation.

There was one quite serious difficulty involved in Aunt Maria’s deserting her post, and that was, Maria was too young to be left alone in the house every night while her father was visiting his fiancee.  She could not stay at Mrs. White’s, because it was obviously unfair to ask them to remain up until nearly midnight to act as her guardian every, or nearly every, night in the week.  However, Harry submitted the problem to Miss Slome, who solved it at once.  She had, in some respects, a masterly brain, and her executive abilities were somewhat thrown away in her comparatively humble sphere.

“You must have the house cleaned,” said she.  “Let the woman you get to clean stay over until you come home.  She won’t be afraid to go home alone afterwards.  Those kind of people never are.  I suppose you will get Mrs. Addix?”

“They tell me she is about the best woman for house-cleaning,” said Harry, rather helplessly.  He was so unaccustomed to even giving a thought to household details, that he had a vague sense of self-pity because he was now obliged to do so.  His lost Abby occasionally, he believed, had employed this Mrs. Addix, but she had never troubled him about it.

It thus happened that every evening little Maria Edgham sat guarded, as it were, by Mrs. Addix.  Mrs. Addix was of the poor-white race, like the Manns—­in fact, she was distantly related to them.  They were nearly all distantly related, which may have accounted for their partial degeneracy.  Mrs. Addix, however, was a sort of anomaly.  Coming, as she did, of a shiftless, indolent family, she was yet a splendid worker.  She seemed tireless.  She looked positively radiant while scrubbing, and also more intelligent.  The moment she stopped work, she looked like an automatic doll which had run down:  all consciousness of self, or that which is outside self, seemed to leave her face; it was as if her brain were in her toiling arms and hands.  Moreover, she always went to sleep immediately after Harry had gone and Maria was left alone with her.  She sat in her chair and breathed heavily, with her head tipped idiotically over one shoulder.