Then with a long, deep sigh, she went slowly out of the room, and Isabel watched her affected weakness and indifference with a kind of scornful pity. For women see through women, know intuitively their little tricks and make-beliefs, and for this very reason a daughter's love for her mother--however devoted and self-sacrificing--lacks that something of mystical worship which a son feels for his mother. The daughter knows she wears false hair and false teeth and pink and white powder; the son simply takes her as she looks and thinks "what a lovely mother I have!" The daughter has watched her mother's little schemes for happy household management, and probably helped her in them; the son knows only their completed comfort and their personal pleasure. He never dreams of any policy or management in his mother's words and deeds, and hence he believes in her just as he sees and hears her. And her wisdom and love seem to him so great and so unusual, that an element of reverence--the highest feeling of which man is capable--blends itself with all his conceptions of mother. And the wonder is, that a daughter's love exists, and persists, without it. Knowing all her mother's feminine weaknesses, she loves her devotedly in spite of them--nay, perhaps loves her the more profoundly because of them. And if she is not capable of this affection she does not love her at all. Isabel watched her mother leave the house on the wedding cake business and then she went to her sister's room. She found her dressing to go out. "I have an appointment at eleven, Isabel," she said, "and I am so glad you have come to sit beside me while I dress. The days are going so fast, and very soon now you will come to my room, and Christina will not be here, any more in this life." "You will surely come back to your own home sometimes, Christina?" "No. I shall never enter Traquair House again, unless you are sick and need me--then I would come. I have just been going through my top drawer, Isabel; it was full of old gifts and keepsakes, and I declare they brought tears to my eyes." "Why? I dare say the givers have forgotten you--they were mostly school friends, and the Campbelton crowd." "Do you think I had a tear for any of them? No, no! I was nearly crying for myself, for it was really piteous to see the trash a woman of my age thought worth preserving. I sent the whole contents of the drawer to the kitchen--the servant lasses may quarrel about them." "Was there nothing worth taking to your new home? No single thing that had a loving, or a pleasant memory?" "Not one. The whole mess of needlework, and painted cards, toilet toys, and sham trinkets represented my existence until Dora came. It was just as useless and unsatisfying as the trash flung into the kitchen. Dora opened the gates of life for me. Poor Dora!" "Why do you say 'poor Dora'?"