“You bet.”

“I don’t see how he does it!”

“He looks sort of worn-out to me.  He’s grown awful old, I noticed it to-day.”

“Well, all Ida cares for is herself. She don’t see he’s grown old, you can be sure of that,” said Mrs. White, with an odd sort of bitterness.  Actually the woman was so filled with maternal instincts that the bare dream of Harry as her Lillian’s husband had given her a sort of motherly solicitude for him, which she had not lost.  “It’s a shame,” said she.

“Oh, well, it’s none of my funeral,” said Lillian, easily.  She took a chocolate out of a box which her lover had sent her, and began nibbling it like a squirrel.

“Poor man,” said Mrs. White.  Tears of emotion actually filled her eyes and mingled with the rheum of her cold.  She took out her moist ball of handkerchief again and dabbed both her eyes and nose.

Lillian looked at her half amusedly, half affectionately.  “Mother, you do beat the Dutch,” said she.

Mrs. White actually snivelled.  “I can’t help remembering the time when his poor first wife died,” said she, “and how he and little Maria came here to take their meals, poor souls.  Harry Edgham was just the one to be worked by a woman, poor fellow.”

Lillian sucked her chocolate with a full sense of its sweetness.  “Ma, you can’t keep track of all creation, nor cry over it,” said she.  “You’ve got to leave it to the Lord.  Have you taken your pink pellet?”

“Poor little Maria, too,” said Mrs. White.

“Good gracious, ma, don’t you take to worryin’ over her,” said Lillian.  “Here’s your pink pellet.  A young one dressed up the way she was to-day!”

“Dress ain’t everything, and nothin’ is goin’ to make me believe that Ida Slome is a good mother to her, nor to her own child neither.  It ain’t in her.”

Lillian, approaching her mother at the window with the pink pellet and a glass of water, uttered an exclamation.  “For the land’s sake, there she is now!” she said.  “Look, ma, there is Maria in her new suit, and she’s got the baby in a little carriage on runners.  Just look at the white fur-tails hanging over the back.  Ain’t that a handsome suit?”

Mrs. White gazed out eagerly.  “It must have cost a pile,” said she.  “I don’t see how he does it.”

“She sees you at the window,” said Lillian.

Both she and her mother smiled and waved at Maria.  Maria bowed, and smiled with a sweet irradiation of her rosy face.

“She’s a little beauty, anyhow,” said Lillian.

“Dear child,” said Mrs. White, and she snivelled again.

“Ma, either your cold or the stuff you are takin’ is making you dreadful nervous,” said Lillian.  “You cry at nothin’ at all.  How straight she is!  No stoop about her.”

Maria was, in fact, carrying herself with an extreme straightness both of body and soul.  She was conscious to the full of her own beauty in her new suit, and of the loveliness of her little sister in her white fur nest of a sledge.  She was inordinately proud.  She had asked Ida if she might take the child for a little airing before the early Sunday dinner, and Ida had consented easily.