At that moment the door opened and Mrs. Hilary came in with her bonnet on. She glanced around with frigid greeting.
"So I'm not late to dinner after all. I had thought you would be at table. The tram was so slow I was sorry I had not walked and saved the fare." She spoke with an irrational rising and falling of syllables that at once proclaimed her nationality. She was a short, compact little woman with rosy cheeks, abundant hair and a small tight mouth. Mrs. Hilary was a miniature painter by choice and a wife and mother by accident. She was subject to lapses in which she unquestionably forgot the twins' existence. She recalled them suddenly now.
"Has any one seen Gladys and Gwendolen? Dear, dear, I wonder where they are. They wouldn't go to church with me. Those children are such a responsibility."
"But they are such happy children," said gentle little Mrs. Howard, who had come in at the beginning of this speech. In her heart Mrs. Howard dreaded the long-legged, all-pervasive twins, but she pitied the widowed and impoverished little artist. "So sad," she was wont to say to her intimates in describing her lodger, "a young widow left all alone in a foreign country."
"But one would hardly call America a foreign country to an Englishwoman," one friend had interpolated at this point.
"Yes, I know," Mrs. Howard had acknowledged, "but she seems foreign. Her husband was an American, I believe, and he evidently left her with almost nothing. He must have been very unkind to her, she has such a dislike of Americans. She wasn't able to give the regular price for the rooms, but I couldn't refuse her—I felt so sorry for her."
Mrs. Howard liked to "feel sorry for" people. Yet she was apt to find herself at sea in attempting to sympathize with Mrs. Hilary. She was a sweet-faced, tired-looking little woman with a vague smile and dreamy eyes. About five years ago Mrs. Howard had had "reverses" and had been forced by necessity to live to violate the sanctity of her hearth and home; grossly speaking, she had been obliged to take boarders, no feasible alternative seeming to suggest itself. The old house in Eleventh Street, in which she had embarked upon this cheerless career, had never been a home for her or her daughter. Yet an irrepressible sociability of nature enabled her to find a certain pleasure in the life impossible to her more reserved daughter.
As they all sat around now in the parlor, into which the smell of the Sunday turkey had somehow penetrated, a few more guests wandered in and sat about provisionally on the impracticable parlor furniture, waiting for the dinner signal. Mrs. Howard bravely tried to keep up the simulation of social interchange with which she ever pathetically strove to elevate the boarding-house intercourse into the decency of a chosen association.
Suddenly there came a thump and a crash against the door and the twins burst in, their jackets unbuttoned, their dusty picture hats awry.
"Oh! mater, mater!" they cried tumultuously, dancing about her.