After all, she only changed to an arm-chair in the little drawing-room, with her head against a cushion and her feet on a foot-stool, and her cousin still beside her, pulling back the window-curtains once in a while to take a peep outside for her missing husband; in spite of the real kindness of her welcome, Dosia felt a certain preoccupation in it. Her coming was only accessory to the real importance of his, when she herself should have been the event; the warmth of heart which she had expected to feel toward her cousin somehow seemed to fail of expression in this attitude. At the same time, Lois was also conscious of a lack of response, a dullness, in Theodosia. Perhaps the likeness of relationship was answerable for a certain reserve of manner, a formality which neither knew how to break then or at a later time, and which was to last until the barriers were swept away by a mighty flood; but the real cause of the lack of sympathy lay in something much deeper. The strong thought of self is inevitably insulating—it is as restrictive of human contact as a live wire. Dosia, whose young life had all been spent in unselfishness, was experiencing unexpectedly the other swing of the pendulum in an intense and absorbing desire to have everything now as she wanted it. She was tired of thinking of other people; the scene should be set now for _her_. This desire was a huge mushroom growth, sprung up in a night; it had no real root in her nature, and would vanish as suddenly as it had come, but the shadow of it distorted her. The house was very much smaller than Dosia had imagined, and her eyes roved over the little drawing-room in some perplexity, trying to make it come up to her anticipation. All dwellers in small country places, where economy is Heaven’s first law, expect to be dazzled by the grandeur and elegance of “the city.” People in Balderville never dreamed of buying new furniture from towns twenty or thirty miles away; as chair-legs broke off, or rockers split, or tables came to pieces, all sorts of domestic devices were resorted to by all but shiftless householders who tamely submitted to ruin, in coaxing the article into seeming wholeness and keeping it still in active use. The best families were learned in all the little ways and capabilities of string and wire, and wooden cleats and old hinges and tacks, and pieces of tin cut from tomato-cans, and in the glueing on of piano-keys, black-walnut excrescences, ornaments, and sofa-arms.