Mrs. Liddell folded up the epistle and placed it in its envelope; then she sat musing. How cruel it would be to break this butterfly on the wheel of bitter circumstance! It would be irrational, she thought, "to expect the strength that could submit to and endure the inevitable from _her_. She will at once suffer more and less than my Katie. Small exterior things will sting Ada and make her miserable. As long as Katherine's heart is satisfied all else can be borne; but _her_ conditions are more difficult. Heigho! for material ills there is nothing so intolerable as debt." She rose and went to her room with the vague intention of doing some of the hundred and one things which needed doing, one more than another, as was usual in her busy life, but somehow the uncertainty and anxiety oppressing her heart made her incapable of continued action; she was always breaking off to think--and the more she thought, the more uneasy she grew. If she had worked out the thin vein of invention and observation which gained her her humble literary success, one source of income was gone--a source on which she had reckoned too surely. Then she had not anticipated that her daughter-in-law would be so expensive an inmate. Self-denial was a thing incomprehensible to her. As long as she took care of her clothes, and refrained from buying the very expensive garments her soul longed for, she considered herself most exemplary. As for the smaller savings of omnibus and cabs not absolutely needful, she rarely thought of such matters, or, if she did, it made her frightfully cross, and urged her to many spiteful and contemptuous remarks on girls who have the strength of a horse, and do not care what horrid places they tramp through: so that she never was able to lighten the household burdens by a farthing beyond the very small amount she had originally agreed to contribute toward them.
Her mother-in-law's meditations were interrupted by the young widow skurrying in in desperate haste. "Jane has gone for a cab," she exclaimed; "have you that shilling?"
"Here; you had better have eighteenpence, in case--"
"Oh yes, I had better; and do I look nice?"
"Very nice indeed. I think you are looking so much better than you did last year--"