could not be helped for this once. She would try and forget her until she was through and then hurry home. She resolved not to answer back nor get angry that night if anything mean was said to her, and perhaps things would calm down. So she put her mind on logarithms, Latin conjugations and English poetry. These examinations offered the only way she knew to independence and it must be taken.

Late in the afternoon she hurried home, tired, faint, worried lest she had not answered some of the questions aright, palpitating with anxiety lest Nan had preceded her, or the children were running riot.

Breathlessly she came in sight of the house, and saw the front door open wide and the doctor’s car standing in the drive. She ran up the steps in fright and apprehension.

Nan was very much home indeed, and was furious! She met Joyce in the hall and greeted her with a tirade. Junior had been hurt playing baseball and had been brought home with a bandaged head and arm, weeping loudly.

Dorothea lolled on the stairs blandly eating the remainder of the jelly roll and eyeing her cousin with contempt and wicked exultation. She had already lighted the fuse by saying that she and Junior hadn’t wanted to take[11] their lunch, but Cousin Joyce had insisted, and had given them all the jelly roll. The light in her mother’s eye had been such as to make Dorothea linger near at the right time. Dorothea loved being on the virtuous outside of a fight. If one showed signs of dying she knew how to ask the right question or say the innocent word to revive it once more. Dorothea contemplated Joyce now with deep satisfaction.

[11]

The doctor’s car was scarcely out of the gate and down the road before the storm broke once more upon Joyce’s tired head.

Joyce did not wait to go upstairs to her room and change her dress. She took off her hat on the way to the kitchen and put it and her bag and books and papers on the little bench outside the kitchen door where no one would be likely to notice them. She enveloped herself in a big kitchen apron and went to work, preparing the vegetables for dinner and getting out materials for jelly roll. Then Nan entered, blue blazes in her eye.

Nan had not taken off her hat yet and around her neck she was wearing Joyce’s pretty gray fox neckpiece, Aunt Mary’s last Christmas gift, which Joyce had supposed was safely put away in camphor on her closet shelf. Joyce had not 

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