She felt the slackening of speed, and saw (still in her nightmare) the broad stone steps and the stately, old-fashioned mansion, where the daintiest of care and the trimmest of lawns had turned the old ways of architecture from decrepitude into pride. Lunch was on the table, and her mother nodded her pretty smile as she passed. Abbie had a box of flowers in her hand, purchased earlier in the morning; these she brought into the dining-room. There were violets for her mother and American Beauties for Margaret. “They looked so sweet I had to buy them,” she half apologized. Going through the hall, she heard her mother say, “How nice and thoughtful Abbie has grown lately!” And Margaret answered, “Abbie is a good deal more of a woman than I ever expected her to be.” All her life she had grieved because—so she morbidly put it to herself—her people despised her; now that it was too late, was their approval come to her only to be flung away with the rest? She returned to the dining-room and went through the farce of eating. She forced herself to swallow; she talked with an unnatural ease and fluency. Several times her sister laughed at her words. Her mother smiled on her fondly. Margaret said, “Abbie, why can’t you go to Chicago with me to-night and have a little lark? You have clothes to fit, too; Lucy can pack you up, and we can take the night train.” “I _would_,” chimed in Mrs. Courtlandt. “You look so ill, Abbie. I think you must be bilious; a change will be nice for you. And I’ll ask Mrs. Curtis over for a few days while you are gone, and we will have a little tea-party of our own and a little lark for ourselves.” Never before had Margaret wished Abbie to accompany her on “a little lark.” Abbie assented like a person in a dream; only she must go down to the bank after luncheon, she said. Up-stairs in her own chamber she gazed about the pretty furnishings with blank eyes. There was the writing-desk that her mother gave her Christmas, there glistened the new dressing-table that Margaret helped her about finishing, and there was the new paper with the sprawly flowers that she thought so ugly in the pattern, and took under protest, and liked so much on the walls. How often she had been unjust to her people, and yet it had turned out that they were right! Her thoughts rambled on through a thousand memories, stumbling now into pit-falls of remorse over long-forgotten petulance and ingratitude and hardenings of her heart against kindness, again recovering and threading some narrow way of possible release, only to sink as the wall closed again hopelessly about her.