At the head of her own breakfast table,--a breakfast table charmingly
littered with dark-blue china and shining glass, and made springlike by
a great bowl of daisies,--Mary Venable sat alone, trying to read her
letters through a bitter blur of tears. She was not interested in her
letters, but something must be done, she thought desperately, to check
this irresistible impulse to put her head down on the table and cry
like a child, and uninteresting letters, if she could only force her
eyes to follow the lines of them, and her brain to follow the meaning,
would be as steadying to the nerves as anything else.
Cry she would NOT; for every reason. Lizzie, coming in to carry away
the plates, would see her, for one thing. It would give her a blazing
headache, for another. It would not help her in the least to solve the
problem ahead of her, for a third and best. She must think it out
clearly and reasonably, and--and--Mary's lip began to quiver again, she
would have to do it all alone. Mamma was the last person in the world
who could help her, and George wouldn't.