régime for the delicate Elaine and the refractory Ernestine. But she wanted Teresa to come and be talked to, in the intervals of these occupations. It was Nina's impulse to pour out all her troubles to a bosom which ought from ties of blood to be sympathetic; it was Teresa's to keep hers to herself. Nina did not mind this, if she suspected it; but the deep melancholy which Teresa could not help showing, and which inclined her at present to a certain fatalistic view of all troubles, was not pleasing to Nina. Nina was an active person, who believed that all unsatisfactory conditions could be remedied, if only people had good will; and she spent her life in a constant struggle against the natures of the people about her. In this idealistic warfare she reaped the usual reward of militant virtue: one success for a hundred failures, and the consciousness of being the apparent cause of nearly all the unpleasantness in the family life.
"I know I have a bad temper," she admitted to Teresa, "but, heavens, what I have to try it! My only idea is to bring up the children properly and make them strong, and live within our income, so that they shan't be absolute beggars. But I know there are always debts that I know nothing about—always something going on behind my back, or under my very nose, that I can't make out. Of course that makes me suspicious and irritable. Ernesto never interferes
