Below, there was nothing to listen to. Receiving only twelve dollars a month, Luemma seemed to think she must take out the residue of her wages in inefficience and impudence, and did; sometimes she answered the bell, sometimes she "had her hands in the lightbread," etc. The present seemed to be one of the latter times. The bell pealed again; a voice from the front called, "Angela!—are you dressed?"—and Angela, replying to her mother, went down to the door herself, smoothing her hair and trimming her waist as she went.
The caller proved to be none other than her disgraced cousin, Mary Wing.
"Well, Angela, how are you?" said she, entering confidently, and kissed Angela's cheek. "I hope I didn't break into your nap, or anything unforgivable like that?"
"Oh, no, indeed, Cousin Mary. How d' you do? I wasn't asleep."
Cousin Mary was enveloped from neck to heels in a becoming gray raincoat. Beneath that were seen glimpses of a costume rather elaborate for bad weather and a workaday world. Nor did Cousin Mary's manner seem in the least crushed or subdued, as morals demanded that the manner of a disgraced person should be.
All the same, Angela greeted her cordially enough, with only a faint conscientious stiffness traceable to her mother. For one thing, she was really sorry for Mary now; right or wrong, she genuinely wished they hadn't expelled her from the High School, and sent her off to a Grammar School, in a low quarter of the city. And then besides that, whatever Cousin Mary's strange ideas and behavior, the fact remained that she happened still to be one of her, Angela's, particular little coterie—that small group of friends and relatives with whom she herself seemed to be sadly out of touch just now.
Mary entered with the air of being in a hurry. In the car-shaped parlor she unbuttoned her coat, nevertheless, the Latrobe heater being, like the doorbell, small but powerful. Angela, seated on the famous sofa, said:—
"Cousin Mary, you're all dressed up! I believe you're going to a party!"
Mary glanced down at herself with indifference.
"No," said she, "but I've been to a little sort of one, a luncheon. And we didn't leave the hotel till half an hour ago, either—"