Aunt Maria sniffed. "I wonder when you will ever be old enough to take care of yourself?" said she. "You need to be watched every minute like a baby." "I was warm enough, Aunt Maria," Maria repeated, patiently. "Well, sit down here by the stove and get heated through while I see to supper," said Aunt Maria, crossly. "I've got a hot beef-stew with dumplings for supper, and I guess I'll make some chocolate instead of tea. That always seems to me to warm up anybody better." "Don't you want me to help?" said Maria. "No; everything is all done except to make the chocolate. I've had the stew on hours. A stew isn't good for a thing unless you have it on long enough to get the goodness out of the bone." Aunt Maria opened the door leading to the dining-room. In winter it served the two as both kitchen and dining-room, having a compromising sort of stove on which one could cook, and which still did not look entirely plebeian and fitted only for the kitchen. Maria saw through the open door the neatly laid table, with its red cloth and Aunt Maria's thin silver spoons and china. Aunt Maria had a weakness in one respect. She liked to use china, and did not keep that which had descended to her from her mother stored away, to be taken out only for company, as her sister-in-law thought she properly should do. The china was a fine Lowestoft pattern, and it was Aunt Maria's pride that not a piece was missing. "As long as I take care of my china myself, and am not dependent on some great, clumsy girl, I guess I can afford to use it," she said. As Maria eyed the delicate little cups a savory odor of stew floated through the room. She realized that she was not hungry, that the odor of food nauseated her with a sort of physical sympathy with the nausea of her soul, with life itself. Then she straightened herself, and shut her mouth hard. The look of her New England ancestresses who had borne life and death without flinching was on her face. "I will be hungry," Maria said to herself. "Why should I lose my appetite because a man who does not care for me is going to marry another girl, and when I am married, too, and have no right even to think of him for one minute even if he had been in earnest, if he had thought of me? Why should I lose my appetite? Why should I go without my supper? I will eat. More than that, I will enjoy eating, and neither George Ramsey nor Lily Merrill shall prevent it, neither they nor my own self." Maria sniffed the stew, and she compelled herself, by sheer force of will, to find the combined odor of boiling meat and vegetables inviting. She became hungry. "That stew smells so good," she called out to her aunt, and her voice rang with triumph. "I guess it _is_ a good stew," her aunt called back in reply. "I've had it on four hours, and I've made dumplings."