She made
no intimate acquaintances there; her sordid and selfish dreams occupied
her too completely. Girls who admired her beauty were repelled by her
heartlessness, which they felt, but could not clearly define. Even
Azalea fell away from her, having found a stout and bald-headed railway
conductor, whose adoration made amends for his lack of romance. Maud
knew she was not liked in the school, and being, of course, unable to
attribute it to any fault of her own, she ascribed it to the fact that
her father was a mechanic and poor. This thought did not tend to make
her home happier. She passed much of her time in her own bedroom,
looking out of her window on the lake, weaving visions of ignoble
wealth and fashion out of the mists of the morning sky and the purple
and gold that made the north-west glorious at sunset. When she sat with
her parents in the evening, she rarely spoke. If she was not gazing in
the fire, with hard bright eyes and lips, in which there was only the
softness of youth, but no tender tremor of girlhood's dreams, she was
reading her papers or her novels with rapt attention.
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