bill or an indiscriminate heap of silver. "You are a regular little
Jew," she would reply lightly to Linda's protests. This, the latter
thought, was unfair; for the only Jew she knew, Mr. Moses Feldt, an
acquaintance of their present period in New York, was quite the most
generous person she knew. "Certainly you don't take after your mama."

After she said this she always paused with tight lips. It was
charged with the assumption that, while Linda didn't resemble her,
she did very much a mysterious and unfavorably regarded personage.
Her father, probably. More and more Linda wondered about him. He was
dead, she knew, but that, she began to see, was no reason for the
positive prohibition to mention him at all. Perhaps he had done
something dreadful, with money, and had disgraced them all. Yet she
was convinced that this was not so.

She had heard a great many uncomplimentary words applied to
husbands, most of which she had been unable to comprehend; and she
speculated blankly on them in her mother's connection. On the whole
the women agreed that they were remarkably stupid and transparent,
they protested that they understood and guided every move husbands
made; and this surely gave her father no opportunity for independent
crime. She was held from questioning not so much by her mother's
command--at times she calmly and successfully ignored that--as from
its unfortunate effect on the elder.

Mrs. Condon would burn with a generalized anger that sank to a
despondency fortified by the brandy flask. Straining embraces and
tears, painful to support, would follow, or more unbearable
silliness. The old difficulties with giggling or sympathetic
chambermaid;--Linda couldn't decide which was worse--then confronted