Excerpt from A Garden of Roses: Stories and Sketches Their mother was devoted to them. NO matter how ill or weary she might be, she would hasten to save them from the necessity of doing anything that she could do. They accepted the service as a matter Of course. Their father had never been very rich. A certain economy had always been necessary in his household; when, in the winter, the ques tion of new gowns and wraps recurred, it was understood, Of course, that the girls were to have the most costly articles of that kind; while their mother was contented to take what was left after they had gotten what they fancied they needed. They had seal-skin sacks and diamond ear rings; while their mother, still young, and certainly more interesting in every way than her daughters, wore cheap garments. But nobody seemed to be struck by the strangeness of this arrangement. It was not singular in their set; it was the rule for mothers to take the second place even before their daughter assumed long gowns. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.