“I am afraid I must sell it, then.” Gita was now completely indifferent to the impression she was making on this disagreeable person as well as to the fact of Easter Sunday. “You see, it brings me in no income whatever and I really need more money.” “I cannot give up this house!” Gita almost jumped. There was a note of fighting passion in the woman’s voice. “I have lived in it for thirty years. My children were born in it.” “Oh—I’m sorry.” She felt curiously disconcerted, almost sympathetic, but after all she was not turning paupers into the street. “Perhaps—I hardly know what to say. Mr. Donald advised me——” “I could take in paying guests. We have several spare rooms. I never expected to come to that but I’d do it and pay you more rent.” “It isn’t so much a matter of income——” And then she rose with a sigh of relief. A girl was coming down the stairs, and she looked as unlike her presumable mother as possible. Mrs. Pelham stood up. “My daughter, Mrs. Brewster—Miss Carteret,” she said in her stiff precise manner. “I hope you will excuse me for a few moments.” And she hastily left the room. “‘Mrs.!’” said Gita, smiling once more as she resumed her seat on a chair as hard as any at Carteret Manor. “I was sure you were a girl like myself.” “I am only twenty-six, and I’m a widow. My husband died a few months after our marriage. But that seems a long time ago—I was just twenty. I hear this is your first visit East. I hope you like it.” And they exchanged easy commonplaces on the fertile subject of the Boardwalk and Atlantic City. Mrs. Brewster was as slim as Gita and hardly as tall. She, also, held herself erectly, but without stiffness; her dark blue frock was of excellent material fashionably cut; and, observed Gita, who had an eye for clothes, singular in one who disdained them, as well “put on” as Polly’s. Her brown hair was cut short and brushed back from a brow of unfashionable nobility, and her large light eyes were both intelligent and humorous. Gita thought she had never seen a more emphatic little nose nor a more determined chin. If she had ever suffered she bore no trace and looked as if her vision would always be set toward the future in confidence and hope. As the conversation became more personal Gita learned that Mrs. Brewster was buyer for one of the department stores on Atlantic Avenue, a position that took her frequently to Philadelphia and New York. She felt slightly bewildered. It was her first acquaintance with a girl of the business class, and she had assumed vaguely that all members of that order were hard and common. She had once dreaded a similar fate, and although, she told herself, she could not be harder, she had wondered if she would wholly forget the anxious training and admonitions of her mother. But Millicent might have had the bringing-up of Elsie Brewster. Gita wondered if she were a snob and felt secretly humiliated.