She also cherished a hope that this trouble would leave her, as a fever abates in the night, that she would awake some morning, if she only had patience, strong and well.

In other things Miss Cardiff, was sometimes jarred rather than shocked by the American girl's mental attitudes, which, she began to find, were not so posed as her physical ones.

Elfrida often left her repelled and dissenting.

The dissent she showed vigorously; the repulsion she concealed, sore with herself because of the concealment.

But she could not lose Elfrida, she told herself; and besides, it was only a matter of a little tolerance--time and life would change her, tone her inner self down into the something altogether exquisite and perfect that she was, to look at, now.
Elfrida called the Cardiffs' house the oasis of Kensington, and valued her privileges there more than she valued anything else in the circumstances about her, except, perhaps, the privilege she had enjoyed in making the single contribution, to the _Decade_ of which we know.
That was an event lustrous in her memory, the more lustrous because it remained solitary and when the editor's check made its tardy appearance she longed to keep it as a glorious archive--glorious that is to say, in suggestion, if not particularly impressive intrinsically.