The whole place was cosey, in that it was lighted by gas and heated by furnace registers, possessing also a small grate, set with an asbestos back, a method of cheerful warming which was then first coming into use.

By her industry and natural love of order, which now developed, the place maintained an air pleasing in the extreme.
Here, then, was Carrie, established in a pleasant fashion, free of certain difficulties which most ominously confronted her, laden with many new ones which were of a mental order, and altogether so turned about in all of her earthly relationships that she might well have been a new and different individual.

She looked into her glass and saw a prettier Carrie than she had seen before; she looked into her mind, a mirror prepared of her own and the world's opinions, and saw a worse.
Between these two images she wavered, hesitating which to believe.
"My, but you're a little beauty," Drouet was wont to exclaim to her.
She would look at him with large, pleased eyes.
"You know it, don't you ?" he would continue.
"Oh, I don't know," she would reply, feeling delight in the fact that one should think so, hesitating to believe, though she really did, that she was vain enough to think so much of herself.
Her conscience, however, was not a Drouet, interested to praise.

There she heard a different voice, with which she argued, pleaded, excused.

It was no just and sapient counsellor, in its last analysis.