What probably stung her most keenly was the fact that certain improvements, for which her mother had always longed but always thought she could not have, were being made in the house.

A bay-window was being built in the parlor, and one over it, in the room which had been her father's and mother's, and which Maria dimly realized was, in the future, to be Miss Ida Slome's.

Maria's mother had always talked a good deal about some day having that bay-window.

Maria reflected that her father could have afforded it just as well in her mother's day, if her mother had insisted upon it, like Miss Slome.

Maria's mother had been of the thrifty New England kind, and had tried to have her husband save a little.