He could eat nothing whatever that noon.

He kept thinking about the dressmaker, and how Fanny would ask him again to take some of that money out of the bank to pay her, and how the money was already taken out.
That evening, when he sat down to the tea-table furnished with the best china and frosted cake in honor of the dressmaker, and heard the radiant talk about Ellen's new frills and tucks, he had a cold feeling at his heart.

He was ashamed to look at the dressmaker.
"You won't know your daughter when we get her fixed up for Vassar," she told Andrew, with a smirk which covered her face with a network of wrinkles under her blond fluff of hair.
"Do have some more cake, Miss Higgins," said Fanny.

She was radiant.
The image of her daughter in her new gowns had gone far to recompense her for all her disappointments in life, and they had not been few.

"What, after all, did it matter ?" she asked herself, "if a woman was growing old, if she had to work hard, if she did not know where the next dollar was coming from, if all the direct personal savor was fast passing out of existence, when one had a daughter who looked like that ?" Ellen, in a new blue dress, was ravishing.