Vashti's Fate — page 268: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

oe a y => TANTALIZATION. — 263 hopelessly at her own white, useless fingers, and could not, or would not, help herself in the least, She would sit for hours in her own room, brooding gloomily over her griefs, or coming upon her sister sweep- ing, or attending to some other of the manifold duties she had latterly taken upon herself, would snatch the household implement from her hands, and flinging it across the room, break forth we a bitter tirade upon the whole ‘‘ disgraceful arrangement.” ‘“Aunt Margery has money,” she said, ‘‘let her save you from this. I don’t believe there is any need of it. You are Only doing it to vex and shame me for my idle useless. ness. I can’t work—I don’t want to work—L don’t know how, and I wouldn't if I did.” ‘Aunt Margery has no money,’ Nora would say in her gentle tones, ‘‘She sent her money to you, and Frank, too.” “Sent her money? ‘Then she must have known what \ was coming; it is of a piece with her usual maneuvering disposition. It was just one of her plans to ‘save us,’ as she calls it. Does she think she makes the matter any better by bringing me home to this gloomy Hades? The place is as dismal as a mad-house. She knew what we were coming to, I know she did. Why couldnt she tell us? She cheered us on to that extravagant style of living, she did, Nora; she meant to bring us down to drink this cup of poverty’s distilling, and if she lives long enough she'll see that she has made another miserable mistake.” Nora did not often reply to such outbreaks as this, She had her own suspicions that Aunt Margery had planned to this end, but she kept them quite to herself. - _. - *y Awe ee eS . st. 4 mm ey te - , ae " ‘ GCOmMmIcboo cs com: