“Nobody is going to attach her for my debts,” Carroll said, laughing, but stroking her head fondly.

“No, she is not an available asset.  I never will go, Arthur.  The others may do as they think best.  I will not go.”

“Not to-night, Anna, honey,” Carroll said, as he went out of the room.

Anna Carroll, left alone, rose languidly, unfastened her red silk gown, and let it fall in a rustling circle around her.  She let down her soft, misty lengths of hair, in which was a slight shimmer of white, and brushed it.  Standing before her dresser, using her ivory-backed brush with long, even strokes, her reflected face showed absolutely devoid of radiance.  The light was out of it—­the light of youth, and, more than the light of youth, the light of that which survives youth, even the soul itself.  And yet there was in this face, so unexpectant and quiescent that it gave almost the effect of dulness, a great strength and charm which were the result of an enduring grace of attitude towards all the stresses of life.  Anna Carroll carried about with her always, not for the furbishing of her hair nor the embellishment of her complexion, but for the maintenance of the grace and dignity of her bearing towards a hard and inscrutable fate, a species of mental looking-glass.  She never for a minute lost sight of herself as reflected in it.  She had not been a happy woman, but she had worn her unhappiness like a robe of state.  She had had a most miserable love-affair in her late youth, but no one except her brother could have affirmed with any certainty that it had occasioned her a moment’s pang.

She was hopeless as regarded any happiness for herself in a strictly personal sense.  She knew that her destiny as a woman had been unfulfilled, but she would rather have killed herself than pitied herself.  She was as hard to herself and her own possible weakness as she was to anybody on earth, possibly harder.  She cheated the dressmaker, she ate at the expense of others, as she would have cheated herself had she known how.  It did not occur to her to go without anything which she could by any means get; not because she wanted it so keenly, as from another phase of the same feeling which had led Minna Eddy to appropriate the rug, and Estella Griggs the paraphernalia of the tea-table and the sofa-pillow.  She had herself been duped in a larger sense; she was a creditor of Providence.  She considered that she had a right to her hard wages of mere existence, when they came in her way, were they in the form of red silk gowns or anything else.  She would admit no wrong in her brother, for the same reason, reserving only the right to condemn him at times on the boy’s account.  She began thinking about the boy as she went on with her preparations for bed.  Her face lit up a little as she reflected upon the benefit it might be to Eddy to be in Kentucky.  She thought of the dire possibility of serious complications for Arthur in this culminating crisis of his affairs.