Linda's determination to go to Philadelphia had not been shaken, and she made a vain effort to explain her attitude. “Of course, it was horrid for you,” she said. “I can understand how you'd never never forgive him. But I am different, and, I expect, not at all nice. It's very possible, since he was my father, that we are alike. I wish you had told me this before--it explains so much and would have made things easier for me. I am afraid I must see them.” She was aware of the bitterness and enmity that stiffened her mother into an unaccustomed adequate scorn: “I might have expected nothing better of you, and me watching it coming all these years. You can go or stay. I had my life in spite of the both of you, as gay as I pleased and a good husband just the same. I don't care if I never see you again, and if it wasn't for the fuss it would make I'd take care I didn't. You'll have your father's money now I'm married; I wonder you stay around here at all with your airs of being better than the rest. God's truth is you ain't near as good, even if I did bring you into the world.” “I am willing to agree with you,” Linda answered. “No one could be sweeter than the Feldts. I sha'n't do nearly as well. But that isn't it, really. People don't choose themselves; I'm certain father didn't at that lonely Italian place. If you weren't happy laced in the morning it wasn't your fault. You see, I am trying to excuse myself, and that isn't any good, either.” “Unnatural,” Mrs. Moses Feldt pronounced. And Linda, weary and depressed, allowed her the last word. XIX Nothing further during the subsequent brief exchange of notes between Miss Lowrie and Linda was said of the latter's intention to visit her father's family. Mrs. Feldt, however, whose attitude toward Linda had been negatively polite, now displayed an animosity carefully hidden from her husband but evident to the two girls. The elder never neglected an opportunity to emphasize Linda's selfishness or make her personality seem ridiculous. But this Linda ignored from her wide sense of the inconsequence of most things. Yet she was relieved when, finally, she had actually left New York. She looked forward with an unusual hopeful curiosity to the Lowries. To her surprise their house--miles, it appeared, from the center of the city--was directly on a paved street with electric cars, unpretentious stores and very humble dwellings nearby. Back from the thoroughfare, however, there were spacious green lawns. The street itself, she saw at once, was old--a highway of gray stone with low aged stone façades, steep eaves and blackened chimney-pots reaching, dusty with years, into the farther hilly country.