Her father had become not one parent, but both to her; and it seemed that whereever she looked he was always there, overshadowing like a mountain everything else on her horizon.

In the beginning they had been very poor; but he had never let her suffer for things, although for weeks at a time she knew that he had gone without his tobacco in order to buy her toys.

Until she went to the little village school, she had always had an old woman to look after her, and later on, when their circumstances appeared miraculously to improve, he employed the slim, gray, uninteresting spinster who slept now a few doors away from her.
There were hours when it seemed to her that she had never learned the meaning of tediousness until the plain but hopeful Miss Spencer came to live with her.
Rising from her chair, she moved away from the mirror, and wandered restlessly to the pile of fashion magazines and festively decorated "books on etiquette" that littered the table beside the chintz-covered couch.

"They don't know everything!" she thought contemptuously.

How hard she had tried to learn, and yet how confused, how hopeless, it all seemed to her to-night! All the hours that she had spent in futile study appeared to her wasted! At her first dinner she had felt as bewildered and unhappy as if she had never opened one of those thick gaudy volumes that had cost so much--as much as a box of chocolates every day for a week.