"I must say it," Evelina insisted, her flushed face burning
with a kind of bitter cruelty. "You don't know what life's like--
you don't know anything about it--setting here safe all the while
in this peaceful place."

"Oh, Evelina--why didn't you write and send for me if it was
like that?"

"That's why I couldn't write. Didn't you guess I was
ashamed?"

"How could you be? Ashamed to write to Ann Eliza?"

Evelina raised herself on her thin elbow, while Ann Eliza,
bending over, drew a corner of the shawl about her shoulder.

"Do lay down again. You'll catch your death."

"My death? That don't frighten me! You don't know what I've
been through." And sitting upright in the old mahogany bed, with
flushed cheeks and chattering teeth, and Ann Eliza's trembling arm
clasping the shawl about her neck, Evelina poured out her story.
It was a tale of misery and humiliation so remote from the elder
sister's innocent experiences that much of it was hardly
intelligible to her. Evelina's dreadful familiarity with it all,
her fluency about things which Ann Eliza half-guessed and quickly
shuddered back from, seemed even more alien and terrible than
the actual tale she told. It was one thing--and heaven knew
it was bad enough!--to learn that one's sister's husband was a
drug-fiend; it was another, and much worse thing, to learn from