These spinsters, like Mrs.Carr, spent their lives in a beautiful and futile pretence--the pretence of keeping up an appearance.

They also took in the plain sewing of their richer relatives, who lived in Franklin Street, and sent them little trays of sweet things as soon as the midday dinner was over on Sunday.

Sometimes they would drop in to see Mrs.Carr just before supper was ready, and then they would pretend that they lived on tea and toast because they were naturally "light eaters," and that they sewed all day, not for the money, but because they liked to have "something to do with their hands" They were tall thin women in organdie caps and black alpaca dresses made with long basques which showed a greenish cast in the daylight.

The walls of their rooms were covered with family portraits of the colonial period, and Mrs.Carr, who had parted with most of her treasures, often wondered how they had preserved so many proofs of a distinguished descent.

Even her silver had gone--first the quaint old service with the Bolton crest, which had belonged to her mother; then, one by one, the forks and spoons; and, last of all, Gabriella's silver mug, which was carried, wrapped in a shawl, to the shop of old Mr.Camberwell.She was a woman who loved inanimate things with the passion which other women give only to children, and a thousand delicate fibres of sentiment knit her soul to the portraits on the wall, to the furniture with which she lived, to the silver and glass that had once belonged to her mother.
When one after one these things went from her, she felt as if the very roots of her being were torn up from the warm familiar earth in which they had grown.