“Becoming,” said she.  “It actually makes you hideous.  That shade is impossible for you and why,—­I trust you will not be offended, you know it is for your own good, dear,—­why do you wear your hair in that fashion?”

“I am afraid it is not very becoming,” said Annie with the meekness of those who inherit the earth.  She did not state that her aunt Harriet had insisted that she dress her hair in that fashion.  Annie was intensely loyal.

“Nobody,” said Margaret, “unless she were as beautiful as Helen of Troy, should wear her hair that way, and not look a fright.”

Annie Eustace blushed, but it was not a distressed blush.  When one has been downtrodden one’s whole life, one becomes accustomed to it, and besides she loved the down-treader.

“Yes,” said she.  “I looked at myself in my glass just before I came and I thought I did not look well.”

“Hideous,” said Margaret.

Annie smiled agreement and looked pretty, despite the fact that her hair was strained tightly back, showing too much of her intellectual forehead, and the colour of her gown killed all the pink bloom lights in her face.  Annie Eustace had a beautiful soul and it showed forth triumphant over all bodily accessories, in her smile.

“You are not doing that embroidery at all well,” said Margaret.

Annie laughed.  “I know it,” she said with a sort of meek amusement.  “I don’t think I ever can master long and short stitch.”

“Why on earth do you attempt it then?”

“Everybody embroiders,” replied Annie.  She did not state that her grandmother had made taking the embroidery a condition of her call upon her friend.

Margaret continued to regard her.  She was finding a species of salve for her own disappointment in this irritant applied to another.  “What does make you wear that hair ring?” said she.

“It was a present,” replied Annie humbly, but she for the first time looked a little disturbed.  That mourning emblem with her father’s and mother’s, and a departed sister’s hair in a neat little twist under a small crystal, grated upon her incessantly.  It struck her as a species of ghastly sentiment, which at once distressed, and impelled her to hysterical mirth.

“A present,” repeated Margaret.  “If anybody gave me such a present as that, I would never wear it.  It is simply in shocking bad taste.”

“I sometimes fear so,” said Annie.  She did not state that her Aunt Jane never allowed her to be seen in public without that dismal adornment.

“You are a queer girl,” said Margaret, and she summed up all her mood of petty cruelty and vicarious revenge in that one word “queer.”

However, little Annie Eustace only smiled as if she had been given a peculiarly acceptable present.  She was so used to being underrated, that she had become in a measure immune to criticism, and besides criticism from her adored Mrs. Edes was even a favour.  She took another bungling stitch in the petal of a white floss daisy.