Sally always remembered that winter, a winter of hard work and growing anxiety for her, enlivened by brief and occasional joys. She got to know Fox and Henrietta very well, which was a continual joy and enlivenment. Sally did not count dancing-school among the enlivenments. And the infrequent lessons with Fox and Henrietta and her father were enlivenments, too, usually; not always. After the times when they were not, Sally wanted to cry, but she didn't, which made it all the harder. Her mother seemed steadily progressing toward permanent invalidism, while her father was doing much worse than that. And she took more and more of the burden of both upon her own small shoulders. Poor child! She should have known no real anxiety; none more real than the common anxieties of childhood. But perhaps they are real enough. Sally was not eleven yet. It is hard to say whether her mother or her father caused Sally the more anxiety. Her mother's progress was so gradual that the change from day to day--or from week to week, for that matter--was not noticeable; while her father's was spasmodic. Sally did not see him during a spasm, so that she did not know how noticeable the change was from day to day or from hour to hour. We do not speak of weeks in such cases. But it was just after a spasm that he was apt to make his appearance again at home in a condition of greater or less dilapidation, with nerves on edge and his temper in such a state that Mrs. Ladue had grown accustomed, in those circumstances, to the use of great care when she was forced to address him. Lately, she had avoided him entirely at such times. Sally, on the contrary, made no effort to avoid him and did not use great care when she addressed him, although she was always respectful. This course was good for the shreds of the professor's soul and perhaps no harder for Sally. But that was not the reason why she did it. She could not have done differently.