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hating her, if it were a question of winning her confidence, of replacing the mother, of being a sister, a companion, a friend … But the girl was closed, indifferent. She seemed unable to grasp the importance of Mrs. Holland in her father’s life. There was an innocence, a lack of prudence, in her references to the situation; she said things that made shame and caution fill Mrs. Holland’s heart. She was able to remark, casually, to Helen and May, “My father and Mrs. Holland drove all the way to California in this car,” reducing the trip (undertaken with many doubts, with fear, with a feeling that hotel clerks were looking through and through her) to a simple, unimportant outing involving two elderly people, long past love.
    They crawled into the center of town, in the wake of streetcars. Mrs. Holland, afraid for her charges, drove so slowly thatshe was a traffic hazard. An irritated policeman waved them by.
    “Is the store all right?” Mrs. Holland said to Ruth. “Would you rather go somewhere else?” She had circled the block twice, looking for a parking space.
    Ruth, annoyed by all this caution, said, “Don’t ask me. It’s up to the girls. They’re the guests.”
    But neither of the girls could choose. Helen was shy, May absorbed. Mrs. Holland found a parking place at last, and they filed into the store.
    “I used to come here all the time with my sister,” May said, suddenly coming to as they stood, jammed, in the elevator. “We came for birthdays and for treats. We had our birthdays two days in a row, because we’re twins and otherwise it wouldn’t be fair. We wore the same clothes and hardly anybody could tell us apart. But now,” she said, echoing a parental phrase, “we have different clothes and we go to different schools, because we have to develop separate personalities.”
    “Well,” said Mrs. Holland, unable to take this in. “Have you a sister?” she said to Helen.
    There was a silence; then Helen blurted out, “We’re seven at home.”
    “How nice,” said Mrs. Holland. But Helen knew that people said this just to be polite, and that being seven at home was just about the most shameful thing imaginable.
    “Are your sisters at school with you?” Mrs. Holland asked.
    Everyone in the elevator was listening. Helen hung her head. She had been sent to school by an uncle who was also her godfather and who had taken his duties seriously. Having promised to renounce Satan and all his works in Helen’s name, he uprooted her, aged six, from her warm, rowdy, half-literate family and packed her off to school. In school, Helen had beentold, she would learn to renounce Satan for herself and, more important, learn to be a lady. Some of the teachers still remembered her arriving, mute and frightened, quite as frightened as if the advantages of superior schooling had never been pointed out. There were only three boarders Helen’s age. They were put in the care of an elderly housekeeper, who filled a middle role, neither staff nor servant. After lessons they were sent to sit with her, in her red-papered, motto-spangled room. She taught them hymns; the caterwauling got on her nerves, but at least they sat still while singing. She supervised their rushed baths and murderously washed their hair. Sometimes some of the staff wondered if more should not be done for the little creatures, for although they were clean and good and no trouble, the hand that dressed them was thorough but unaffectionate, and they never lost the wild-eyed hopelessly untidy look of unloved children. Helen now remembered very little of this, nor could she imagine life away from school. Her uncle-godfather conscientiously sent her home each summer, to what seemed to her a common, clamorous, poverty-stricken family. “They’re so loud,” she would confide to the now quite elderly person who had once taught her hymns. “Their voices are so loud. And they drink, and everything.” She had grown up to be a tall, quiet girl,