Making Allowances for Mamma––––––––
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, f
