had said to her. They tugged at her heart until she felt it would burst in her breast. It was only by not remembering that she could go on living.
It was these thoughts of her mother's which had made her seem so different from the others, and she was different, too, because she put on gloves when she worked, to keep her hands smooth, and waved her hair, and wore her cheap, plain clothes with an air of distinction. Yet these things did not quite explain why she and her sisters were so unlike. Now and then their divergence of ideas would create a crisis, as when the aunts would protest that Hildegarde's manners were too fine for a farm.
"It makes me nervous to have her stand up when I come in a room. None of the other boys and girls do it."
"I don't want her to be like the other boys and girls," Hildegarde's mother had said.
Yet in spite of that unexplained fineness, her mother had never shirked the hardest labor. Indeed, it was whispered that hard work had killed her. Hildegarde hated that. She knew it was not true. Her mother had said:
"Work is the most beautiful thing in the world, my darling. You don't know it yet, but you will some day. And it holds people from madness."
Her mother had said these things to her, usually, when they were in their own big room, their two little white beds side by side, a candle by each bed, and a book.
Hildegarde's mother had always read late into the night. Hildegarde would read until half-past nine, and
