She acted on this superstition as if it were a religion.
"If it had not been for my despair, as you call it, Alma," she answered, "I don't know where we should have been now." "I suppose we should have been in St.Barnaby," said the girl.

"And if it's worse to be in New York, you see what your despair's done, mamma.
But what's the use?
You meant well, and I don't blame you.

You can't expect even despair to come out always just the way you want it.
Perhaps you've used too much of it." The girl laughed, and Mrs.Leighton laughed, too.

Like every one else, she was not merely a prevailing mood, as people are apt to be in books, but was an irregularly spheroidal character, with surfaces that caught the different lights of circumstance and reflected them.

Alma got up and took a pose before the mirror, which she then transferred to her sketch.