She bent her head over her work again, holding it up to the light from time to time and straining her eyes to catch the exact thread with her almost impalpably fine needle. Lydia sat and fanned herself, looking flushed and tired from the walk in the heat, and listening in silence to Mrs. Mortimer's account of the various happenings of her household: "And didn't I find that good-for-nothing negro wench had been having that man--and goodness knows how many others--right here in the house. I told Ralph I never would have another nigger--but I shall. You can't get anything else half the time. I tell you, Lydia, the servant problem is getting to be something perfectly terrible--it's--" Lydia broke in to say, "Why don't you buy new ones?" Mrs. Mortimer paused with uplifted needle to inquire wildly, "New _what_?" "New curtains, instead of spending a whole week in hot weather mending those." "Good gracious, child! Will you ever learn anything about the cost of living! I think it's awful, the way Father and Mother have let you grow up! Why, it would take half a month's salary to reproduce these curtains. I got them at a great bargain--but even then I couldn't afford them. Ralph was furious." "You could buy muslin curtains that would be just as pretty," suggested Lydia. "Why, those curtains are the only things with the least distinction in my whole parlor! They _save_ the room." "From what?" "From showing that there's almost nothing in it that cost anything, to be sure! With them at the window, it would never enter people's heads to think that I upholstered the furniture myself, or that the pictures are--" "Why shouldn't they think so, if you did?" Lydia proffered this suggestion with an air of fatigued listlessness, which, her sister thought, showed that she made it "simply to be contrary." Acting on this theory, she answered it with a dignified silence. There was a pause. Lydia tilted her head back against the chair, and looked out of the window at the new green leaves of the piazza vine. Mrs. Mortimer's thin, white, rather large hands drew the shining little needle back and forth with a steady, hurrying industry. It came into her mind that their respective attitudes were symbolical of their lives, and she thought, glancing at Lydia's drooping depression, that it would be better for her if she were obliged to work more. "Work," of course, meant to Marietta those forms of activity which filled her own life. "_I_ never have any time for notions," she thought, the desperate, hurrying, straining routine of her days rising before her and moving her, as always, to rebellion and yet to a martyr's pride.