That day as she was returning from her long-deferred twenty-minute dairy-lunch, she had charged, umbrella down, almost full into a pretty lady getting out of a shiny gray limousine. Such an unnecessarily pretty lady, all furs and fluffles and veils and perfumes and waved hair! Her cheeks were pink and her expression was placid, and each of her white-gloved hands held tight to a pretty picture-book child who was wriggling with wild excitement. One had yellow frilly hair and one had brown bobbed hair, and both were quaintly, immaculately, expensively kissable. They were the kind of children every girl wishes she could have a set like, and hugs when she gets a chance. Mother and children were making their way, under an awning that crossed the street, to the matinee of a fairy-play. The Liberry Teacher smiled at the children with more than her accustomed goodwill, and lowered her umbrella quickly to let them pass. The mother smiled back, a smile that changed, as the Liberry Teacher passed, to puzzled remembrance. The gay little family went on into the theatre, and Phyllis Braithwaite hurried on back to her work, trying to think who the pretty lady could have been, to have seemed to almost remember her. Somebody who took books out of the library, doubtless. Still the pretty lady's face did not seem to fit that conjecture, though it still worried her by its vague familiarity. Finally the solution came, just as Phyllis was pulling off her raincoat in the dark little cloak-room. She nearly dropped the coat. "Eva Atkinson!" she said. Eva Atkinson!... If it had been anybody else but _Eva_! You see, back in long-ago, in the little leisurely windblown New England town where Phyllis Braithwaite had lived till she was almost eighteen, there had been a Principal Grocer. And Eva Atkinson had been his daughter, not so very pretty, not so very pleasant, not so very clever, and about six years older than Phyllis. Phyllis, as she tried vainly to make her damp, straight hair go back the way it should, remembered hearing that Eva had married and come to this city to live. She had never heard where. And this had been Eva--Eva, by the grace of gold, radiantly complexioned, wonderfully groomed, beautifully gowned, and looking twenty-four, perhaps, at most: with a car and a placid expression and _heaps_ of money, and pretty, clean children! The Liberry Teacher, severely work-garbed and weather-draggled, jerked herself away from the small greenish cloak-room mirror that was unkind to you at your best. She dashed down to the basement, harried by her usual panic-stricken twenty-minutes-late feeling. She had only taken one glance at herself in the wiggly mirror, but that one had been enough for her peace of mind, supposing her to have had any left before. She felt as if she wanted to break all the mirrors in the world, like the wicked queen in the French fairy-tale.