And now she began thinking of 'Anonyma'; turning her position over and over.

The idea that anyone young and beautiful should thus be clipped off in her life, roused her impatient indignation.

Let them try it with her! They would soon see! For all her cultivated 'hardness,' Barbara really hated anything to suffer.

It seemed to her unnatural.

She never went to that hospital where Lady Valleys had a ward, nor to their summer camp for crippled children, nor to help in their annual concert for sweated workers, without a feeling of such vehement pity that it was like being seized by the throat: Once, when she had been singing to them, the rows of wan, pinched faces below had been too much for her; she had broken down, forgotten her words, lost memory of the tune, and just ended her performance with a smile, worth more perhaps to her audience than those lost verses.