With the exception of paying her wages or making some childish complaint, Abigail Clergy seldom spoke to Hopeful. It was an event to be summoned into those always lighted, seldom aired front rooms, crowded with keepsakes of a bygone generation, to stand before the chair of the imperious creature in her rusty black silk and hear her upbraidings over the fact that harmless urchins had been seen crossing the Fincherie lawn. During the first tedious years of Miss Clergy’s self-imprisonment, Hopeful, then younger and stronger of spirit, used to remonstrate against the order of things, urge a new doctor, a jaunt to the seaside, even if she saw no one. She tried to persuade Miss Clergy to wear new gowns, to turn off the penetrating gaslights which burned day and night no matter how bright the sun or how mellow the moon, to open the windows and let the fresh air revive her spirits, read a daily paper and, gradually, gently be swept back into the current of everyday living. To none of these suggestions did Miss Clergy lend anything but a deaf ear. Her life had become her martyrdom and she did not propose to lose a single jot of it. With the exception of Ali Baba, who had proved himself faithful beyond a doubt, Miss Clergy had registered an everlasting hatred and distrust of men, it mattered not who. No clergyman dared enter her door; her physicians were women, her lawyers acted as if they had been sentenced to the gallows and were merely enjoying a brief stay of execution. No man could ever command even her respect, she had told Hopeful; no woman could have her confidence or her love. She hated all living creatures. And as the years passed with Miss Clergy a trifle more wrinkled of skin, whiter of hair and distorted of mind, Hopeful ceased making efforts to change her viewpoint. Indeed, she, too, fell into a sort of charmed, even existence, free from material want or keenness of interest in the world without. The Clergy fortune continued to multiply. All Miss Clergy had to do was figuratively to wave a yellowed, jewelled hand and a barrel of gold was at her command. Yet no repairs were permitted to be made at the Fincherie, not even a new coupé nor for Ali Baba a new livery. And when, one by one, the old mares would die and the purchase of another was inevitable, Miss Clergy would fly into a rage. When, perforce, Hopeful demanded to clean the two front rooms, Miss Clergy would scold sharply, as she moved into one of them, waiting with added martyrdom until she could fly back into the other to complain about some minute change in the placing of a book or the position of a chair. The rest of the house, however, was left to Hopeful’s guardianship, and, when she tried to persuade Miss Clergy to come downstairs and sit in the pleasant parlors or eat in the little breakfast room, Miss Clergy would demand, “Do you want to find another home for yourself, Hopeful? Oh, you do not. Then leave me in peace—at least I am mistress of my own house.”