“Nothing, I guess, that your mother cannot hear,” returned Mrs. Ayres, with forced pleasantry.  She sat down, and Lucy flung herself petulantly upon the bed, where she had evidently been lying, but seemingly not reposing, for it was much rumpled, and the pillows gave evidence of the restless tossing of a weary head.  Lucy herself had a curiously rumpled aspect, though she was not exactly untidy.  Her soft, white, lace-trimmed wrapper carelessly tied with blue ribbons was wrinkled, her little slippers were unbuttoned.  Her mass of soft hair was half over her shoulders.  There were red spots on the cheeks which had been so white in the morning, and her eyes shone.  She kept tying and untying two blue ribbons at the neck of her wrapper as she lay on the bed and talked rapidly.

“I look like a fright, I know,” she said.  “I was tired after church, and slipped off my dress and lay down.  My hair is all in a muss.”

“It is such lovely hair that it looks pretty anyway,” said Rose.

Lucy drew a strand of her hair violently over her shoulder.  It almost seemed as if she meant to tear it out by the roots.

“Lucy!” said her mother.

“Oh, mother, do let me alone!” cried the girl.  Then she said, looking angrily at her tress of hair, then at Rose:  “It is not nearly as pretty as yours.  You know it isn’t.  All men are simply crazy over hair your color.  I hate my hair.  I just hate it.”

“Lucy!” said her mother again, in the same startled but admonitory tone.

Lucy made an impatient face at her.  She threw back the tress of hair.  “I hate it,” said she.

Rose began to feel awkward.  She noticed Mrs. Ayres’s anxious regard of her daughter, and she thought with disgust that Lucy Ayres was not so sweet a girl as she had seemed.  However, she felt an odd kind of sympathy and pity for her.  Lucy’s pretty face and her white wrapper seemed alike awry with nervous suffering, which the other girl dimly understood, although it was the understanding of a normal character with regard to an abnormal one.

Rose resolved to change the subject.  “I did enjoy your singing so much this morning,” she said.

“Thank you,” replied Lucy, but a look of alarm instead of pleasure appeared upon her face, which Rose was astonished to see in the mother’s likewise.

“I feel so sorry for poor Miss Hart, because I cannot think for a moment that she was guilty of what they accused her of,” said Rose, “that I don’t like to say anything about her singing.  But I will say this much:  I did enjoy yours.”

“Thank you,” said Lucy again.  Her look of mortal terror deepened.  From being aggressively nervous, she looked on the verge of a collapse.

Mrs. Ayres rose, went to Lucy’s closet, and returned with a bottle of wine and a glass.  “Here,” she said, as she poured out the red liquor.  “You had better drink this, dear.  You know Dr. Wallace said you must drink port wine, and you are all tired out with your singing this morning.”