14, had a snarl of similar string in his pocket.] Mistress Fagan opened the door of the best parlor.

A woman was sitting there alone, rocking back and forward, and fanning herself with the blackest of black fans.
"Nuss Byloe, is that you?
Well, to be sure, I'm glad to see you, though we 're all in trouble.

Set right down, Nuss, do.

Oh, it's dreadful times!" A handkerchief which was in readiness for any emotional overflow was here called on for its function.
Nurse Byloe let herself drop into a flaccid squab chair with one of those soft cushions, filled with slippery feathers, which feel so fearfully like a very young infant, or a nest of little kittens, as they flatten under the subsiding person.
The woman in the rocking-chair was Miss Cynthia Badlam, second-cousin of Miss Silence Withers, with whom she had been living as a companion at intervals for some years.

She appeared to be thirty-five years old, more or less, and looked not badly for that stage of youth, though of course she might have been handsomer at twenty, as is often the case with women.