When she looked at the scenery, she kept seeing at first only the family group at the station as she had left it: her father, tall, gray-bearded, with hollow eyes, a continually working mouth, a slouching gait, a worn hat and an old striped coat; her stepmother, short, stout, pretty, and unkempt, in a frayed and faded shirtwaist, and a skirt pinned with a large brass safety-pin dragging away from the belt; three barefooted children in nondescript attire beside her, and a curly-haired, brown-eyed boy of two holding her dress with one hand and throwing kisses with the other. That was how Dosia had seen them last. The elders had been so kind about her going, her eyes filled remorsefully at the thought; she had been so shamelessly glad to go! And yet, she did love them. Mingled with a sense of kindness was also a strange little disappointment—she felt that when they turned homeward with their backs to the train they would let her slip out of their lives with the same ease with which they had accustomed themselves to let other things go, with a selfish inertia too deep to feel anything long. Only the baby—little Rolf—he would miss her; he would cry, at any rate for a while, for his Dosia to put him to sleep. Her lips trembled and her arms yearned for him, with a sudden savage instinct of latent motherhood unknown to her placid stepmother. It was characteristic of this girl, who was tired of taking care of children, that the fact of there being a two-year-old baby also at her cousin’s house seemed now its crowning attraction; she turned comfortingly to intimate speculations about the darling.