Marian was very glad that the Saturday she chose for her expedition was Aunt Caroline's day for the Women's and Children's Hospital, and that Isabel had taken Minna and Winnie for a holiday trip into town to see the Art Museum, which left fewer people at home to whom to explain her errand, and to whose comments to reply. Mrs. Carter said it was silly to go so far, and if she couldn't be satisfied to take the girl without, she had better find some one near by. The trained nurse, who was slowly but surely getting the whole household under her control, said that Miss Carter's beautiful new spring suit would be ruined going all the way to South Boston in the horse-cars; and Mrs. Carter, who would never have thought of this herself, seconded her. Marian did not argue the point, but she wore the dress nevertheless. She never felt that anything she wore made any impression on any one she knew, but she could not help fancying that if she had the chance she might impress strangers. No one she knew ever called her pretty, and perhaps five-and-thirty was too old to be thought so; and yet, if there was any meaning in the word, it might surely be applied to the soft, shady darkness of her hair and eyes, and the delicate bloom of her cheeks and lips, set off by that silver-grey costume, with its own skilfully blended lights and shades of silk and cashmere, and the purple and white lilacs that were wreathed together on her small bonnet. She made a bad beginning, for while still enjoying the effect of her graceful draperies as she entered the horse-car for Boston, she carelessly caught the handle of her nice grey silk sunshade in the door, and snapped it short in the middle. She could have cried, though the man who always mended their umbrellas assured her, with a bow and smile, that it should be mended, when she called for it on her way back, "so that she would never know it;" but it deprived her costume of the finishing touch, and she really needed it on this warm sunny day; then, it was a bad omen, and she was foolish enough to believe in omens. Her disturbance prevented her from observing much of the route after she had drifted into a car for South Boston, and had assured herself that it was the right one. Perhaps this was as well, as the first part of the way was sufficiently uninviting to have frightened her out of her intention had she looked about her. When at last she did, they were passing along a wide street lined with sufficiently substantial brick buildings, chiefly devoted to business, crossed by narrower ones of small wooden houses more or less respectable in appearance; but surely no housemaid who would suit them could ever have served in one of these. Great rattling drays squeezed past the car, and Chinese laundrymen noiselessly got in and out. The one landmark she had heard of in South Boston, and for aught she knew the reason of its existence, was the Perkins Institution for the Blind, which her Aunt Caroline sometimes visited.