She was dropping the blue suit upon the red-hot coals and watching it as it spluttered and hissed and sent up great smudges of smoke and an odor of burning wool. She did not stop to cover it up, but, darting up to her room, found the velvet riding cap which suited her so well. She detested it now, and, hurrying back to the kitchen, removed the cover her aunt had replaced and dropped the pretty velvet thing into the fire, and with the poker pushed the burning mass into the flame until it was a charred and blackened crisp. “Are you crazy or what?” Miss Hansford asked, this time rather indignantly, for the room was full of smoke and black flecks, some of which had settled upon the table-cloth she was ironing. “Never was more sane in my life, and never more angry,” Elithe replied. Little by little she told her story, while Miss Hansford listened, forgetting her table-cloth drying on the ironing board and her fire dying down from contact with so much wool and salt water. Never before had Miss Hansford been so indignant. Even Paul came in for a share of her animadversion. He was a fool to care for a girl like Clarice. Everything pertaining to the Percys was brought to light. The bondman was resurrected, with old Roger and the treasury clerks, until there was scarcely a shred of respectability left to the family. And Clarice had insulted Elithe and called her a _guy_ and made fun of her clothes and trunk. At this point Miss Hansford stopped short, remembering how the trunk had looked when brought to her door, and that she had been glad when it was safely housed from the curious eyes of her neighbors. It _was_ battered and rusty, and as for Elithe’s clothes.——Here she took counsel with herself again. She had thought but little of Elithe’s dress, except that it was neat and plain, as a minister’s daughter’s dress ought to be. Now, however, in the light of Clarice’s criticism she awoke to the fact that it was not exactly like that of other girls whom she saw daily in the street. What the difference was she could not have told, she paid so little attention to the fashions. _She_ wore her gowns years; _her_ sleeves were tight to her skin. She didn’t know what the fashions were. But she would know, and Elithe should look like other girls, if she ruined herself in doing it. She had cooled down considerably by the time this decision was reached. “Don’t cry. It’ll make you sick again,” she said to Elithe, whose tears were falling as she recalled the sarcastic criticism which had cut so deep and seemed worse the more she thought of it.