"Aunt Caroline," as Maude called her, took us right up to our room. It was a big corner room with lots of windows, and a rag carpet on the floor, and an open fire, and an enormous bed with six pillows and two feather beds on it. We found that out afterwards, about the beds, but I suspected the terrible truth from the first. Maude's aunt went straight to the closet and took out something, and brought it over to us as we stood kind of huddled together before the fire. She held it out before Maude. It was a "ready-made" silk dress, and if I was a real writer, and not just beginning, I'd try to tell you how that dress looked. But I can't. It would take words I never heard of to do it. I can just say it was simply the most awful thing I ever looked at in color and style, and you will have to imagine it yourself. Afterwards I used to wake at night and think of it and shudder. Maude's aunt held it up, as I said, and there were tears of joy in her eyes.
"It's for you, dear," she said in her thin little cracked voice, "jest a little s'prise from me and your uncle. We went to Barry town last week and bought it for ye."
Then, in that terrible moment, Maude Joyce showed the kind of girl she was, and as I looked on the scene my heart swelled till my breath nearly stopped coming. She went right up to her aunt Caroline and bent over and kissed her on each cheek.
"Thank you, auntie," she said. "That was very kind and generous of you and uncle." Then her aunt cried and kissed her, and said again how happy she and Uncle William were to have Maudie and me with them, and finally she went downstairs and left us to change our dresses after the journey. The moment the door closed behind her, Maude Joyce rushed to the bed and hurled herself on it and buried her head in it, and sobbed and cried, and said the same thing over and over.
"I just can't stand it," she said. "I can't. I can't. We'll go back to-day. We'll leave this awful place and these dreadful people. Can we ever forget this nightmare, May?"
I let her cry for a while. I knew she wasn't a girl to do things impulsively. She would think it all over, with a wisdom far beyond her years. So I sat by the window and didn't say much, and pretty soon she stopped crying and began to think, even as I had known she would do. Finally, after a long time, she got up and came over to me and looked me straight in the eyes, and asked me if I cared for her. Of course I said I did. Then she said, "Will you stand by me through this?" And I said I would. I began, too, to say something about her not minding and what a good time we would have, but she stopped me and kissed me, and changed her dress without another word, and we went down-stairs.
The meal was pretty bad. It was served in the kitchen, and Maude's uncle and aunt reached over the table for things, and the old man ate with his knife and drank his tea out of his saucer, and made strange noises over it. Then in the evening some of the young farmers came in, and the country girls, and they sat around the room and grinned at us sheepishly. The men had cowhide boots, and the girls—oh, well, it really was all pretty dreadful, even if one didn't look at such things as Maudie Joyce did. When we were in bed that night she had another spell of crying.
"If they were only as poor as Job's turkey," she said, "and lived out under a tree and ate nuts, I'd gladly visit them there if they were only—civilized! I hate money. We haven't much ourselves, and none of my family cares for it—but this awful ignorance and vulgarity I can't endure!" And she cried and cried and cried. I went to sleep at last, but I woke often during the night, and whenever I did I heard her turning restlessly from side to side. I suppose it all seems silly to others, but to me, who knew that proud soul so well, it was tragic. I spoke to her sometimes, and patted her back once or twice, but, on the whole, I let her think it out alone. I got a good deal of sleep myself.
When morning came, Maudie sat up in bed and looked at me, and asked me if I was awake. I said I was, and rubbed my eyes and tried to be. It was bitterly cold, but we were used to that in the convent. Maude leaned her elbows on her knees and buried her chin in her hands and began to talk.
