"They can't starve, the poor things!" answered Fanny immediately up in arms for the family, her voice rising above Maria's. Maria familiar with the signs of trouble, lowered her own. "It's different her coming here," Fanny began after a pause with an unexpected quiver of the lips. Maria melted instantaneously, this was so painfully, undeniably the fact, and pressed Fanny's head against her ample bosom. "It's different," Fanny repeated and wished it wasn't different. Suddenly the hunger for Tante Ilde became very insistent, rising up from far out of those happy days when she had been the prettiest girl that any one had ever seen, and had picked daisies in Tante Ilde's garden at Baden and pulled off the petals: "He loves me--loves me not--not."... And _this_ was what Life was.... Maria could do any blessed thing she pleased about Tante Ilde. She, Fanny, washed her hands of the matter. And even the next morning things weren't any better, and she made her toilet snapping crossly at Maria, with the corners of her mouth drawn down, looking fully her age, which though it wasn't great, she couldn't afford to do ... considering.... And then she had gone out to the Bristol to the tinkle of her bracelets, and the slightest rustle of silk, (just enough to let one know somebody was passing,) her eyes stormily sombre under the drooping plume of her hat, her furs enveloping her softly, odorously--all in a not unfamiliar, black sea of depression. That black sea, with no slightest light, that sometimes threatened to flood up above her red, full mouth, above her small, flat ears, above her wide, blue eyes, till she was drowned, till she was dead.... What was the matter that Tante Ilde couldn't walk right in to her own niece's home? And then, it must be confessed, as she walked slowly along, she used some expressions in regard to life and living that she hadn't learned in her father's house. * * * * * Fanny had been likened by a foreign friend to one of her own waltzes,--beautiful and hot, gay and sad, for beneath the passion and beauty they embody is that ever-recurrent note of melancholy, woven through each sparkling melody, to be caught up swiftly into the inevitable coda that for so many of Fanny's kind is the end indeed.