Wasn’t beauty put into the world for the sake of beauty?  And wasn’t it right to love it, and make much of it, and multiply it?  What were arts and human ingenuities for, and the things given to work with?  All this grave weighing of a great moral question was in the mind of the young girl of fifteen again this Sunday morning.  Such doubts and balancings begin far earlier, often, than we are apt to think.

The minister shook hands cordially and respectfully with Mrs. Linceford after church.  He had no hesitation at her stylishness and fineries.  Everybody took everybody else for granted; and it was all right, Leslie Goldthwaite supposed, except in her own foolish, unregulated thoughts.  Everybody else had done their Sunday duty, and it was enough; only she had been all wrong and astray, and in confusion.  There was a time for everything, only her times and thoughts would mix themselves up and interfere.  Perhaps she was very weak-minded, and the only way for her would be to give it all up, and wear drab, or whatever else might be most unbecoming, and be fiercely severe, mortifying the flesh.  She got over that—­her young nature reacting—­as they all walked up the street together, while the sun shone down smilingly upon the world in Sunday best, and the flowers were gay in the door-yards, and Miss Milliken’s shop was reverential with the green shutters before the windows that had been gorgeous yesterday with bright ribbons and fresh fashions; and there was something thankful in her feeling of the pleasantness that was about her, and a certainty that she should only grow morose if she took to resisting it all.  She would be as good as she could, and let the pleasantness and the prettiness come “by the way.”  Yes, that was just what Cousin Delight had said.  “All these things shall be added,”—­was not that the Gospel word?  So her troubling thought was laid for the hour; but it should come up again.  It was in the “seeking first” that the question lay.  By and by she would go back of the other to this, and see clearer,—­in the light, perhaps, of something that had been already given her, and which, as she lived on toward a fuller readiness for it, should be “brought to her remembrance.”

Monday brought the perfection of a traveler’s morning.  There had been a shower during the night, and the highways lay cool, moist, and dark brown between the green of the fields and the clean-washed, red-brick pavements of the town.  There would be no dust even on the railroad, and the air was an impalpable draught of delight.  To the three young girls, standing there under the station portico,—­for they chose the smell of the morning rather than the odors of apples and cakes and indescribables which go to make up the distinctive atmosphere of a railway waiting-room,—­there was but one thing to be done to-day in the world; one thing for which the sun rose, and wheeled himself toward that point in the heavens which would make eight o’clock down