her cabin, and think of her begging me to lend her my sack for a pattern, and wanting to know if ‘polonays’ were still worn.”  She remembered more bitterly the romance that had tickled her earlier fancy, told of two college friends of her brother-in-law’s who were living the “perfect life” in the mines, laboring in the ditches with a copy of Homer in their pockets, and writing letters of the purest philosophy under the free air of the pines.  How, coming unexpectedly on them in their Arcadia, the party found them unpresentable through dirt, and thenceforth unknowable through domestic complications that had filled their Arcadian cabin with half-breed children.

Much of this disillusion she had kept within her own heart, from a feeling of pride, or only lightly touched upon it in her relations with her mother and sister.  For Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Scott had no idols to shatter, no enthusiasm to subdue.  Firmly and unalterably conscious of their own superiority to the life they led and the community that surrounded them, they accepted their duties cheerfully, and performed them conscientiously.  Those duties were loyalty to Hale’s interests and a vague missionary work among the neighbors, which, like most missionary work, consisted rather in making their own ideas understood than in understanding the ideas of their audience.  Old Mrs. Scott’s zeal was partly religious, an inheritance from her Puritan ancestry; Mrs. Hale’s was the affability of a gentlewoman and the obligation of her position.  To this was added the slight languor of the cultivated American wife, whose health has been affected by the birth of her first child, and whose views of marriage and maternity were slightly tinged with gentle scepticism.  She was sincerely attached to her husband, “who dominated the household” like the rest of his “women folk,” with the faint consciousness of that division of service which renders the position of the sultan of a seraglio at once so prominent and so precarious.  The attitude of John Hale in his family circle was dominant because it had never been subjected to criticism or comparison; and perilous for the same reason.

Mrs. Hale presently joined her sister in the veranda, and, shading her eyes with a narrow white hand, glanced on the prospect with a polite interest and ladylike urbanity.  The searching sun, which, as Miss Kate once intimated, was “vulgarity itself,” stared at her in return, but could not call a blush to her somewhat sallow cheek.  Neither could it detract, however, from the delicate prettiness of her refined face with its soft gray shadows, or the dark gentle eyes, whose blue-veined lids were just then wrinkled into coquettishly mischievous lines by the strong light.  She was taller and thinner than Kate, and had at times a certain shy, coy sinuosity of movement which gave her a more virginal suggestion than her unmarried sister.  For Miss Kate, from her earliest youth, had been distinguished by that matronly sedateness of voice and step, and completeness of figure, which indicates some members of the gallinaceous tribe from their callow infancy.