Lily dressed hurriedly; Ada had indeed mystified and disturbed her now; and she was eager to get to the telephone downstairs and find out what in the world this strange communication portended. But as she passed the dining-room door on her way to the little telephone table in the hall, her mother called to her. Mr. and Mrs. Dodge were at breakfast.

“Not now, Mamma. I’ll come in a moment. I want to telephone to Ada first.”

“Lily,” her father said, urgently, “I wouldn’t.”

His tone arrested her, and she paused near the doorway.

“You wouldn’t telephone to Ada?” she asked, nervously. “Why wouldn’t you?”

“Ada’s not there,” he said, gravely. “Come here, Lily.”

She came in slowly, looking at him with an appealing apprehension; and his own look, in return, was compassionate. He held a morning paper in his hand, and moved as if to offer it to her, then withheld it. “Wait,” he said. “Your mother and I both think her family have behaved foolishly. If they’d shown a little more discretion—but she’s the sort of girl nobody’d have dreamed would be up to this sort of thing, and I suppose they must have been terribly upset. Of course, they might have known the papers would get it, though, when they began calling up the police to look for her and stop the——”

“Police!” Lily gasped. “Papa! What are you talking about?”

“Ada Corey,” he said. “She never came home from the dance last night. She’s run away with that crazy young Price Gleason. They eloped from the Country Club, and the paper says they were married at a village squire’s office about an hour afterward.”

With that, not looking at her, but at his plate, he offered her the newspaper. Lily did not take it. She stared at it, wholly incredulous; then she reddened with sudden high colour, and, remembering Ada’s queer look of last night, needed not even the confirmation of the queerer letter just read to understand that the thing was true.

She said nothing, but after a moment went to her chair at the table, and, although he did not look at her, Mr. Dodge had a relieved impression that she was about to sit down and eat her breakfast in a customary manner. Then his wife rose suddenly and moved as if to go to her.

“Let me alone!” Lily gasped. She ran out of the door and up to her own room.

She felt that she could not live. No one could live, she thought, and bear such agony. The dimensions of her anger, too great to be contained, were what agonized her.

“To think of their daring to make me a mere blind!” she cried out to her mother, when Mrs. Dodge followed her. “To think they dared! It’s the treachery of it—the insolence of it! I can’t live and be made a mere blind! I can’t, Mamma!”

IN THE meantime, touching these mothers and daughters, there was a figure not thus far appeared among them, yet destined to be for a while their principal topic and interest. She was, indeed, at this time, a lonely figure, a niece of Mrs. Cromwell’s but not well known to her and living a day’s rail journey to the westward. On the November day of Lily Dodge’s agony this niece of Mrs. Cromwell’s was as agonized as Lily.

Each thought herself the unhappiest soul in the world, and yet, with greater wisdom, each might have known that no girl can ever think herself the unhappiest but that, at the same time, other girls—somewhere—will be thinking the same thing and suffering as sadly. The lonely niece’s tragedy was as dark as Lily’s, but came about in a different way.

The group of girls who had happened to meet at the corner of Maple Street and Central Avenue that morning was like the groups their mothers had sometimes formed, years before, on the same corner. This is to say, it was not unlike any other group of young but marriageable maidens pausing together by chance at a corner in the “best residence section” of a town of forty or fifty thousand inhabitants, anywhere in the land.

Three of these seven girls were on their way homeward from ‘downtown’; three were strolling in the opposite direction; and the seventh, seeing the two parties meet and begin their chatter with loud outcries, had come hurrying from a quiet old house near by to join them. The six made a great commotion. Their laughter whooped on the whirling autumn wind that flapped their skirts about them; their gesturing hands fluttered like the last leaves of the agitated shade trees above them; their simultaneous struggles for a hearing, shattering the peace of the comfortable neighbourhood, were not incomparable to the disorderly uproar of a box of fireworks prematurely exploding on the third of July.

The seventh girl, who had come across the lawn of the quiet old house on the corner to join them, also shouted, begging to be told the cause of so much vociferation.

“What’s happened? What on earth’s the matter?” she cried, going from one to another of the clamorous damsels and trying to make herself heard. “What is it? What’s going on? What’s it all about?”

One or two took cognizance of her with a nod and a hasty greeting, “Hello, Elsie,” but found no more time for her; and the rest paid no attention whatever to her or to her eager inquiries. They were too busy shouting, “But listen, my dear!” or “I never in all my life!” or “My dear, you never saw anything like it!” though the smallest of them, a pretty brunette with the most piercing voice of all, did at last begin an explanatory response to the repeated entreaties of this Elsie. “Paul Reamer said——” But, as if realizing the waste of so much energy upon a person unconcerned in the matter, she immediately turned to the others, shrieking, “Listen! For Heaven’s sake, listen! He said he’d be along before we got halfway home! He said——”

Then even the small brunette’s remarkable voice was merged in the conglomerate disturbance, and Elsie was no wiser than before. She continued to go from one girl to another, shouting, “What about Paul Reamer? What’s he done? What about him?” But for all the response she got she might have been both invisible and inaudible.

The uproar the six girls were making had no coherence; it accomplished nothing; it was merely a happy noise; and yet it seemed to be about something that concerned the six and was understood by them—something that had nothing to do with the seventh girl and could not be understood by her. The six were not hostile to her; they were merely unaware of her, or, at least, in their excitement, too dimly aware of her to pay any heed to her.

So, presently, she gave over her efforts and stood silent, a little apart from the shouting group and smiling; but her smiling was only an expression of hers, not a true token of feeling within. She wished to go on making her share of the noise; but a persistently disregarded questioner must always become at last a mere onlooker. Thus, Elsie found herself excluded from the merriment she had come to join; and she felt obliged to maintain a lively and knowing look upon her face, so that passers-by might not think her an outsider, for she did not know how to go away with any grace or comfort. Excluded, she could only stand near the congenial, vociferous six and try to look included—a strain upon her facial expression. The strain became painful as she still lingered and the merry group grew merrier; but what pained her more was her regret that she had rushed out so hopefully to meet an exclusion she should have known enough to expect.

She might have known enough to expect it because this was an old familiar experience of hers, an experience so much worse than customary that it was invariable. And another familiar old experience, or phase of this one, was repeated as she stood there, smiling and somewhat glassily beaming, trying to look knowing and included.

From down the street there came swiftly into nearer view an open touring car, driven by a slender young gentleman of a darkly handsome yet sprightly aspect; and upon this the six clamoured far beyond all clamours they had made before. The debonair motorist steered his machine to the curb, close to them, jumped out, was surrounded by the vociferators, and added his own cheerful shoutings to theirs.

What they all meant to convey was for the most part as unknown to Elsie Hemingway as if they gabbled Arabic, though the name “Paul” was prevalent over the tumult, amidst which the owner of it was seized by his coat lapels, his shoulders, even by his chin, and entreated to “listen!” Finally, however, some sort of coherent communication seemed to be established among them, and the young man emerged from the group, though the small girl with the piercing voice still clung to one of his coat pockets. “Call up Fred!” she screamed. “Tell him we won’t wait one instant!”

He detached himself. “Elsie, can I use your telephone?” he asked, but evidently regarded the question as unimportant, for he was already upon his way and did not pause.

“Oh, do!” she cried, enthusiastically, glad to seem a part of the mystery at last, and she turned to go with him. “Do you want to call up Fred Patterson to bring his car? Are you getting up a party, Paul? What’s the——”

He had rushed ahead of her and was at the open front door of the house. “Where do you keep it?” he called back to her.

“Wait! It’s in the back hall. Wait till I show you,” she cried; but he ran into the house, found the telephone, and was busy with it before she reached him.

“Did you get Fred’s number?” she asked, eagerly.

He was smiling and his eyes were bright with anticipations that seemed to concern not Elsie but the instrument before him. He did not look at her or seem even to hear her, but moved the nickeled prong up and down impatiently.

“Can’t you get him?” Elsie inquired, and she laughed loudly. Her air was that of a person secretly engaged with another upon a jocular enterprise bound to afford great entertainment. “Old Fred is the slowest old poke, isn’t he? Suppose I try, Paul.”

Young Mr. Reamer’s eyes wandered to her and lost their lustre, becoming dead with absent-mindedness immediately. He said nothing.

“Let me try to get that funny old Fred,” Elsie urged in the same eager voice; and she stretched forth a hand for the instrument.

Upon this he moved his shoulder in her way, turning from her, and at the same time a small voice crackled in the telephone. Mr. Reamer’s brightness of expression returned instantly. “You bet it’s me!” he said. “And if you don’t hurry up here in that old tin boat of yours, you’re going to get killed! The whole gang’s out here on the curbstone, simply raving, right in front of Elsie Hemingway’s.”

“I believe it is Fred!” Elsie exclaimed. “I believe you’ve got him after all. Does he say——”

“You better hurry!” the young man said to the mouthpiece as he dropped the receiver into its hook. Then, as he turned toward the door, he seemed to become conscious, though vaguely, that he was not alone. “Much ’bliged, Elsie,” he said. “Goo’bye!”

“Wait. Wait just a minute, Paul.”

“What for?”

“Fred isn’t on his way yet, I don’t suppose,” she said, timidly. “Let’s—let’s wait in Papa’s library till he comes. There are some pretty interesting books in there I’d like to show you. Papa’s great on bindings and old editions. Wouldn’t you like to see some of ’em?”

“Well, another day maybe,” he answered, obviously surprised. “You see Mamie Ford and all the girls are out there, and I——”

“Wait,” she begged, for he was in motion to depart. “Aren’t you ever coming to see me again, Paul?”

“What?” He appeared to have no comprehension of her meaning.

“Aren’t you ever coming to see me again?” She laughed lightly, yet there was a tremor in her voice. “I don’t believe you’ve been in our house for over two years, Paul.”

“Oh, yes, I have,” he returned. “I must have been here a whole lot in that much time. G’bye, Elsie; the girls are——”

But again she contrived to detain him. “Wait. When will you come to see me again, Paul?”

“Oh, almost any time.”

“But when? What day?”

This urgency, though gentle, bothered him, and he wished he hadn’t thought of using Elsie’s telephone. He was a youth much sought, as he had reason to be pleasantly aware, and life offered him many more interesting vistas than the prospect of an afternoon or an evening or a substantial part of either, to be spent tête-à-tête with Elsie Hemingway. Pressed to give a definite reason why such a prospect dismayed him, he might have been puzzled. Elsie wasn’t exactly a bore; she wasn’t bad-looking, and nobody disliked her. Probably he would have fallen back upon an explanation that would have been satisfactory enough to most of the young people with whom he and Elsie had “grown up.” Elsie was “just Elsie Hemingway,” he would have said, implying an otherwise unexplainable something inherent in Elsie herself, and nothing derogatory to the Hemingway family.

“When will you come, Paul?”

“Why—why, right soon, Elsie. Honestly I will. I’ll try to, that is. Honestly I’ll——”

“Paul, it’s true you haven’t been here in over two years.” Elsie’s voice trembled a little more perceptibly. “The last time you were here was when you came to Mother’s funeral. You had to come then, because you had to bring your mother.”

“Oh, no,” he said, a little shocked at this strange reference. “I was gl—— I mean I wanted to come. I’ll come again, too, some day, before long. I must run, Elsie. The girls——”

“You won’t say when?” She spoke gravely, looking at him steadily, and there was more in her eyes than he saw, for he was not interested in finding what was there, or in anything except in his escape to the gaiety outdoors.

He laughed reassuringly. “Oh, sometime before very long. I’ll honestly try to get ’round. Honestly, I will, Elsie. Listen!”

There were shriekings of his name from the street and lawn. “G’bye! I’m coming!” he shouted, and dashed out of the house to meet the vehement demand for him. He was asked at the top of several voices “what on earth” he’d been doing all that time; but no one even jocularly suggested Elsie as a cause of his delay.

When he had gone, she went to the front door and closed it, keeping herself out of sight; then she stood looking through the lace curtain that covered the glass set into the upper half of the door. The amiable youth she had called “old Fred,” accompanied by a male comrade, was just arriving in a low car wherein they reclined almost at full length rather than sat. The small but piercing Miss Ford leaped to join them, and the other girls, screaming, each trying to make her laughter dominant, piled themselves into Paul Reamer’s car. Both machines trembled into motion at once, and swept away, carrying a great noise with them up the echoing street.

Elsie stood for a little while looking heavily out at nothing; then she went slowly up the old, carpeted stairway to her own room, where she did a singular thing. She took a hand mirror from her dressing-table, looked searchingly into the glass for several long and solemn minutes, then dropped down upon her bed and wept. She might have been a beauty discovering the first gray hair.

It was strange that she should look into a mirror and then weep because, if the glass was honest with her, its revelation should have been in every detail encouraging. The reflection showed lamenting gray eyes, but long-lashed and vividly lustrous; it showed a good white brow and a neat nose and a shapely mouth and chin. No one could have asked a mirror to be coloured a pleasanter tan brown than where it reflected Elsie’s rippling hair; and as for the rest of her, she was neither angular nor awkward, neither stout nor misshapen in any way, but the contrary. Yet this was not the first time she had done that strange thing;—she had come too often silently to her room, looked into her mirror, and then fallen to long weeping.

THE FIRST time she had done it she was only twelve; but even then her reason for it was the same. At the end of a children’s party she realized that she had been miserable, and that she was never anything except miserable at parties. She always looked forward to them; always thought for days about what she would wear; always set forth in a tremor of excitement; and then, when she was there, and the party in full swing, she spent the time being wretched and trying to look happy, so that no one would guess what she felt. She had always the same experience: in the games the children played, if two leaders chose “sides,” she was the last to be chosen, except when she was ignored and left out altogether, which sometimes happened. When they danced she usually had no partners except upon the urgency of mothers or hostesses;—the boys rushed to all the other girls and came lagging to Elsie only in duty or in desperation. So at last, being twelve, she realized what had been happening to her—and came home to look secretly into her mirror and then to weep.

As she grew older, and her group with her, nothing changed; she was a wallflower. The other girls were all busy with important little appointments—“dates” they called them—Elsie had none. With the liveliest eagerness the others talked patteringly about things that were meaningless to her; and when she tried to talk that way, too, she failed shamefully. She tried to laugh with them, and as loudly as they did, when she had no idea what they were laughing about; and for a long time she failed to understand that usually they were laughing about nothing. On summer evenings the boys and girls clustered on other verandas, not hers; and, sitting alone, she would hear the distant frolicking and drifts of song. At dances for her sixteen and seventeen-year-old contemporaries, everything was as it had been when she was twelve. Even when her mother, guessing a little of the truth, tried to help her, and, in spite of failing health, worked hard at “entertaining” for Elsie, the entertaining failed of its object;—Elsie was not made “popular.”

“Why not?” she had passionately asked herself a thousand times. “Why do they despise me so?”

Yet she knew that they did not even despise her. At times they did despise one of their group, usually a girl; for it seems to be almost a necessity, in an intimate circle of young people, that from time to time there shall be a member whom the rest may privately denounce, and in gatherings vent their wit upon more or less openly.

During the greater part of her seventeenth year the dashing Mamie Ford had been in this unfortunate position without any obvious cause. The others were constantly busy “talking” about her, finding new faults or absurdities in her; snubbing her and playing derisive practical jokes upon her—for it is true that youth is cruel; self-interest takes up so much room. Elsie envied her, for at least Mamie was in the thick of things; and the centre of the stew. That was better than being a mere left-outer, Elsie thought; and Mamie fought, too, and had her own small faction, whereas a left-outer has nothing to fight except the vacancy in which she dwells—a dreary battling. Mamie’s unpopularity passed, for no better reason than it had arrived;—she was now, at nineteen, the very queen of the roost, and Elsie, wondering why, could only conclude that it was because Mamie made so much noise.

Elsie had long ago perceived that, of the girls she knew, those who made the loudest and most frequent noises signifying excitement and hilarity were the ones about whom the boys and, consequently, the other girls, most busily grouped themselves. Naturally, the simple males went where vivacious sound and gesture promised merriment; and of course, too, a crowd naturally gathers where something seems to be happening. So far as Elsie could see, the whole art of general social intercourse seemed to rest on an ability to make something appear to be happening where nothing really was happening.

What had always most perplexed her was that the proper method of doing this seemed to be the simplest thing in the world, and was, nevertheless, in her own hands an invariable failure. She had watched Mamie Ford at dances and at dinners where Mamie was the life of the party, and she observed that in addition to shouting over every nothing and laughing ecstatically without the necessity of being inspired by any detectable humour, Mamie always offered every possible evidence—flushed face, sparkling eyes, and unending gesticulations—that she was having a genuinely uproarious “good time” herself. Elsie had tried it; she had tried it until her face ached; but she remained only an echo outside the walls. Nobody paid any attention to her.

Therefore she had no resource but to infer what she had inferred to-day, when the merry impromptu party whirled away without a thought of including her, and when Paul Reamer had so carelessly evaded her urgency—her shameless urgency, as she thought, weeping upon her coverlet. This inference of hers could be only that she had some mysterious ugliness, some strange stupidity, and it was this she sought in her mirror, as she had sought it before. It evaded her as it always did; but she knew it must be there.

“What is wrong about me?” she murmured, tasting upon her lips the bitter salt of that inquiry. “They couldn’t always treat me like this unless there’s something wrong about me.”

She was sure that the wrong thing must be with herself. The Hemingways were one of the “old families”;—they had always taken a creditable part in the life of the town, and the last man of them, her father, owned and edited the principal newspaper of the place. Elsie had no prospect of riches, but she was not poor; and other girls with less than she were “popular.” Therefore the wrong thing about her could be identified in nothing exterior. Moreover, when she pursued her search for the vital defect she could not attribute it to tactlessness; for that has some weight, and she was weightless. She danced well, she dressed as well as any of the girls did, and her father told her that she “talked well,” too;—he said this to her often, during the long evenings she spent with him in his library. Yet he was the only one who would listen to her, and, though she adored him, he was not the audience she most wanted. She “talked well”; but even by pleading she could not get Paul Reamer to spend five minutes with her.

No wonder! Paul was the great beau of the town, and she the girl least of all like a belle. And, remembering his plain consciousness of this contrast, almost ludicrously expressed in his surprise that she should try to detain him with her for even a few minutes, she shivered as she wept. She hated herself for begging of him; she hated herself for having run out of the house to try for the thousandth time to be one of a “crowd” that didn’t want her; she hated herself for “hanging around them,” laughing and pretending that she was one of them, when anybody could see she wasn’t. She hated herself for having something wrong about her, and for not being able to find out what it was; she hated herself, and she hated everything and everybody—except her father.

. . . At dinner that evening he reproached her for being pale. “I don’t believe you take enough exercise,” he suggested.

“Yes, I do. I took a long walk this afternoon. I walked four or five miles.”

“Did you?” He smiled under his heavy old-fashioned, gray lambrequin of a moustache, and his eyeglasses showed a glint of humorous light. “That doesn’t sound as if you went with a girl companion, Elsie! Four or five miles, was it?”

“I went alone,” she said, occupied with her plate.

His humorous manifestations vanished and he looked somewhat concerned. “Is that so? It might have been jollier the other way, perhaps. I sometimes think I monopolize you too much, young woman. For instance, you oughtn’t to spend all your evenings with me. You ought to keep up your contemporary friendships more than you do, I’m afraid. Why don’t you ask the girls and boys here to play with you sometimes?”

“I don’t want them.”

“Would you like to give a dance—or anything?”

“No, Papa.”

He sighed. “I’m afraid your young friends bore you, Elsie.”

“No,” she said. “It isn’t that exactly. I just——” She left the sentence unfinished.

“You just don’t take much interest in ’em,” he laughed.

“Well—maybe.” Still occupied with the food before her, though her being occupied with it meant no hearty consumption of it, she seemed to admit the charge. “Something like that.”

“It shouldn’t be so,” he said. “From the little I see of ’em I shouldn’t spot any of ’em for a lofty intellect precisely, but young people of that sort in a moderate-sized city like this usually do seem to older people just a pack of incomprehensible gigglers and gabblers. I suppose you never hear much from ’em except personalities and pretty slim jokes, and it may get tiresome for a girl as solid on the Napoleonic Period as you are.” He paused to chuckle. “I don’t suppose you hear much discussion of Madame de Rémusat among ’em, do you?”

“No.”

“What I’m getting at,” he went on;—“you oughtn’t to think too much about intellectual fodder or be bored with people your own age because they can’t offer it.”

At that she glanced wanly at him across the table. “I’m not, Papa. They don’t bore me.”

“Then I can’t understand your not seeing more of ’em. It isn’t normal, and you’re missing a lot of the rightful pleasures of youth. It’s natural for youth to seek youth, and not to devote all its time to an old codger like me. I believe you need a change.” He looked at her severely and nodded. “I’m serious.”

“What change?”

“Your aunt Mildred’s written me again about your visiting there,” he said. “Your cousin Cornelia finished her school last year. Now she’s home from eight months abroad and they really want you.”

“Oh, no,” Elsie said, quietly, and looked again at her plate.

“Why not?”

“I don’t care to go, Papa.”

“Why don’t you?”

Her lip quivered a little, but she controlled it, and he saw no sign of emotion. “Because I wouldn’t have a good time.”

“I’d like to know why you wouldn’t,” he returned a little testily. “Your aunt Mildred is the best sister I had. She’s a pretty fine person, Elsie, and she’s always wanted to know you better. She says Cornelia’s turned out to be a lovely young woman, and they both want you to come. She’s sure you’ll like Cornelia.”

“Maybe I would,” Elsie said, moodily. “That isn’t saying Cornelia’d like me.”

“Of all the nonsense!” he cried, and he laughed impatiently. “How could she help liking you? Everybody likes you, of course. Mildred says Cornelia has a mighty nice circle of young people about her; they have such jolly times, it’s fun just watching ’em, Mildred says; and she enjoys entertaining a lot. They have that big house of theirs, and they’re near enough the city to go in for the theatre when they want to and——”

“I know,” Elsie interrupted. “They’re great people, and it’s a big, fashionable suburb and everything’s grand! I’m not dreaming of going, Papa.”

“Aren’t you? Well, I’m dreaming of making you,” he retorted. “You haven’t been there since you were a little girl, and your aunt says it’s shameful to treat her as if she lived in China, when it’s really only a night or day’s run on a Pullman. They want you to come, and they expect to give you a real splurge, Elsie.”

“No, no,” she said, quickly; and if he could have seen her downcast eyes he might have perceived that they were terrified. “Let’s don’t talk of it, Papa.”

“Let’s do,” he returned, genially. “I suppose you think that because you’re bored by this little set of young people of yours, here, you’ll be bored by Cornelia’s friends. I don’t know, but I’d at least guess that they might be a little more metropolitan, though of course young people are pretty much the same the world over nowadays.”

“Yes,” Elsie said in a low voice. “I’m sure they would be.”

“More metropolitan, you mean?”

“No,” Elsie said. “I mean they’d be the same as these are here.”

“Well, at least you might give ’em a try. They might prove to be more——”

“No,” Elsie said again. “They’d be just the same.”

This was the cause of the obstinacy that puzzled and even provoked him during a week of intermittent arguing upon the matter. Elsie was sure that one thing he said was only too true: “Young people are pretty much the same the world over nowadays”; and in her imagination she could conjure up no picture of herself occupying among her cousin Cornelia Cromwell’s friends a position different from that she held among her own. They would be polite to her for the first hour or so, she knew, and then they would do to her what had always been done to her. They would treat her as a weightless presence, invisible and inaudible, a left-outer.

Her aunt and Cornelia would expect much of her; and they would be kind in their disappointment; but they would have her on their hands and secretly look forward to the relief of her departure. Elsie could predict it all, and in sorry imaginings foresee the weariness of her aunt and cousin as they would daily renew the task of privately goading reluctant young men and preoccupied girls to appear conscious that she was a human being, not air. The visit would mean only a new failure, a new one on a grander scale than the old failure at home. The old one was enough for her; she was used to it, and the surroundings at least were familiar. The more her father urged her, the more she was terrified by what he urged.

“I’ve made up my mind to compel you,” he told her one evening in the library. “I’m serious, Elsie.”

She did not look up from her book, but responded quietly: “I’m twenty. Women are of age in this state at eighteen, Papa.”

“Are they? I wrote your aunt yesterday that you’re coming.”

“I wrote her yesterday, too. I told her I couldn’t.”

“No other explanation?”

“Of course I said you needed me to run the house, Papa.”

“I didn’t bring you up to tell untruths,” he said. “You’ve learned, it seems; but this one won’t do you any good. You’re going, Elsie, and if you want some new dresses or hats or things you’d better be ordering ’em. You don’t seem to understand I really mean it.”

She dropped her book in her lap and sighed profoundly. “What for?” she asked. “Why do you make such a point of it?”

“Because I’ve been watching you and thinking about you, and I don’t believe I’m doing my duty by you. Not as”—his voice showed feeling—“not as your mother would have me do it. Sometimes you cheer up and joke with me, but I don’t believe you’re happy.”

“But I am.”

“You’re not,” he returned with conviction. “And the reason is, you lead too monotonous a life. A monotonous life suits elderliness, but it isn’t normal for youth. Really, you’re getting to lead the life of a recluse, and I won’t have it. If these provincial young people here bore you so that you won’t run about and play with them as the other girls do, why then you’ve got to try a different kind of young people.”

“But you said young people were all the same, Papa, the world over; and it’s true.”

“At least,” he insisted, “your cousin Cornelia’s will have different faces, and you’re going to go and look at ’em. Elsie, you’re not having a good time, and one way or another I’ve got to make you. You need a new view of some kind; you’ve got to be shaken out of this hermit habit you’ve fallen into.”

“Papa, please,” she said, appealingly. “I don’t want to go. Don’t make me. Please!”

At this he rose from his chair and came to her and took one of her hands in his. The room was warm, and she sat near the fire; but the slender hand he held was cold. “Elsie, I want you to,” he said. “I don’t want to think your mother might reproach me for not making you do what seems best for you. Let me wire your aunt to-morrow you’ll come next week.”

Her lower lip moved pathetically, and along her eyelids a liquid tremulousness twinkled too brightly. “I couldn’t——” she began.

“Don’t tell me that any more, Elsie.”

“No,” she said, meekly. “I meant I couldn’t get ready until week after next, Papa—or the week after that. I couldn’t go before December. Not before then, please, Papa.”

He patted her hand and laughed; pleased that she would be obedient; touched that she was so reluctant to leave him. “That’s the girl! You’ll have a glorious time, Elsie; see if you don’t!” he said, and, looking down tenderly upon her shining eyes, never suspected the true anguish that was there.

IT WAS still there, and all the keener, when Elsie dressed before the French mirror in the big and luxurious bedchamber to which she had been shown on her arrival at her aunt’s house.

“Mrs. Cromwell and Miss Cornelia had an engagement they couldn’t break. They said for me to say they’re sorry they couldn’t be here when you came,” a maid told her. “Mrs. Cromwell said tell you she’s giving a dinner for you and Miss Cornelia this evening. It’s set for early because they’re going to theatricals and dancing somewheres else afterward, so she thought p’raps you better begin dressing soon as your trunk gets here. They’ll have to dress in a hurry, theirselves, so you may not see ’em till dinner.”

But Elsie did not have to wait that long. Half an hour later, when she had begun to dress, Cornelia rushed in, all fur and cold rosy cheeks. She embraced the visitor impetuously. “D’you mind bein’ hugged by a bear?” she asked. “I couldn’t wait even to take off my coat, because I remembered what an awf’ly nice little thing you were! Do you know we haven’t seen each other for nine years?” She stepped back with her hands upon Elsie’s shoulders. “I’ve got to fly and dress,” she said. “My but you’re lovely!”

With that, she turned and scurried out of the room, leaving behind her a mingled faint scent of fur and violets, and the impression upon Elsie that this cousin of hers was the prettiest girl she had ever seen.

Cornelia’s good looks terrified her the more. Probably there were other girls as pretty as that among Cornelia’s friends, the people she was to meet to-night. And Cornelia’s rush into the room, her flashing greeting, so impulsive, and her quick flight away were all flavoured with that dashingness with which Elsie felt she could never compete. “My, but you’re lovely!” was sweet of Cornelia, Elsie thought. But girls usually said things like that to their girl visitors—especially when the visitors had just arrived. Besides, anybody could see that Cornelia was as kind as she was pretty.

“My, but you’re lovely!” was pleasant to hear, even from an impulsive cousin, yet it was of no great help to Elsie. She went on with her dressing, looking unhappily into the glass and thinking of what irony there had been in her father’s persistence. “To make me have a ‘good time’!” she thought. “As if I wouldn’t have had one at home, if I could! But of course he didn’t know that.”

She was so afraid of what was before her, and so certain she was foredoomed, that during this troubled hour she learned the meaning of an old phrase describing fear; for she was indeed “sick with apprehension.” She took some spirits of ammonia in a glass of water as a remedy for that sickness. “Oh, Papa!” she moaned. “What have you done to me?”

The maid who had brought her to her room reappeared with a bouquet of rosebuds and lilies of the valley, to be worn. “It’s from one of the gentlemen that’s coming to dinner, Miss Cornelia said. He sent two. Pr’aps I could pin it on for you.”

Elsie let her render this service, and when it was done the woman smiled admiringly. “It certainly becomes you,” she said. “I might say it looks like you.”

Elsie regarded her with a stare so wide and blank that the maid thought her probably haughty. “Excuse me, ma’am. Could I be of any more assistance?”

“No, thank you,” Elsie said, still staring, and turned again to the mirror as the flatterer left the room.

The bouquet was beautiful, and, before the evening was over, the unknown gentleman who had sent it would be of a mind that the joke was on him, Elsie thought. The misplaced blarney of an Irishwoman had amazed but not cheered her; and the clock on the mantel-shelf warned her that the time was ten minutes before seven. She took some more ammonia.

The next moment into the room came her aunt, large, decorously glittering, fundamentally important. She was also warm-hearted, and she took her niece in her arms and kissed her as if she wanted to kiss her. Then she did as Cornelia had done—held her at arm’s length and looked at her. “You dear child!” she said. “I’ve wanted so long to get hold of you. A man never knows how to bring up a girl; she has to do it all herself. You’ve done it excellently, I can see, Elsie. You have lovely taste; that’s just the dress I’d have picked out for you myself. And to think I haven’t seen you since your dear mother left us! Cornelia hasn’t seen you for much longer than that—you and she haven’t had a glimpse of each other since you were ten or eleven years old.”

“Yes,” Elsie said. “I saw her a little while ago.” She gulped feebly, and by a great effort kept her voice steady. “Aunt Mildred, how proud of her you must be! I want to tell you something: I think Cornelia is the very prettiest girl I’ve ever seen in my whole life.”

Mrs. Cromwell took her hands from her niece’s shoulders, and, smiling, stepped backward a pace and shook her head. “No,” she said. “Cornelia’s very pretty, but she isn’t that pretty.”

“I think she is.”

“No.” Mrs. Cromwell laughed; then became serious. She swept a look over her niece from head to foot—the accurately estimating scrutiny of an intelligent and experienced woman who is careful to be an honest mother. “Of course Cornelia isn’t in your class,” she said, quietly.

Then she turned to the door. “Come down to the drawing-room a minute or so before seven,” she said, and was gone.

Elsie stood, cataleptic.

The words seemed to linger upon the stirred air of the spacious room. “Of course Cornelia isn’t in your class.” Cornelia’s mother had not intended to be satirical; she had been perfectly serious and direct, and she had really meant that Cornelia, not Elsie, was of the lower class of prettiness. Here were three dumfounding things in a row: “My, but you’re lovely!” “It certainly becomes you—I might say it looks like you.” “Of course Cornelia isn’t in your class.” The third was the astounding climax that now made the first two almost—almost convincing!

Elsie rushed to the long mirror and in a turmoil of bewilderment gazed and gazed at what she saw there. And as she looked, there slowly came a little light that grew to be a sparkling in those startled eyes of hers; her lips parted; breathlessly she smiled a little;—then, all in a flash, radiantly. For what she saw in the mirror was charming. No fear of hers, no long experience of neglect, could deny it; and at last she was sure that whatever the wrong thing about her was, it could be nothing she would ever see in a mirror. She was actually what at home she had sometimes suspected and then believed impossible.

She was beautiful—and knew it!

Marvelling, trembling with timid and formless premonitions of rapture, she stood aglow in the revelation. She leaned closer to the mirror and spoke to it in a low voice, almost brokenly: “My, but you’re lovely—I might say it looks like you—of course she isn’t in your class!”

Then, with new and strange stars in her eyes, this sudden Cinderella went out of her room and down the wide stairway, dazed but not afraid. The miracle had already touched her.

Her uncle met her at the doorway of the drawing-room. “This is not little Elsie!” he said. “Why, good heavens, your father didn’t write us his Elsie had grown up into anything like you!”

Immediately he took her upon his arm and turned to cross the room with her, going toward the dozen young people clustered about Cornelia.

But Cornelia came running to her cousin. “You’re dazzling!” she whispered, and it was obvious that Cornelia’s friends had the same impression. They stopped talking abruptly as Elsie entered the room, and they remained in an eloquent state of silence until Cornelia began to make their names known to the visitor. Even after that, they talked in lowered voices until they went out to the dining-room.