She came, with a look upon her as if some unpleasant duty had forced her temporarily into purgatory.  She shied round like a cat in a strange garret, as if all she wanted was to get out.  She wouldn’t dance; she wouldn’t talk; she went home early,—­to her studies, I suppose, and her plans for next day’s unmitigated usefulness.  She took it for granted we had nothing in us but dance, and so, as Artemus Ward says, ’If the American Eagle could solace itself in that way, we let it went!’ She might have done some good to us,—­we needed to be done to, I don’t doubt,—­but it’s all over now.  That light is under a bushel, and that city’s hid, so far as Highslope is concerned.  And we’ve pretty much made up our minds, among us, to be bad and jolly.  Only sometimes I get thinking,—­that’s all.”

She got up, giving the string of rings a final whirl, and tossing them into Leslie Goldthwaite’s lap.  “Good-by,” she said, shaking down her flounces.  “It’s time for me to go and assert myself at Shinar. ‘L’empire, c’est moi!’ Napoleon was great when he said that.  A great deal greater than if he’d pretended to be meek, and want nothing but the public good!”

“What gets crowded out?” Day by day that is the great test of our life.

Just now, everything seemed likely to get crowded out with the young folks at Outledge but dresses, characters, and rehearsals.  The swivel the earth turned on at this moment was the coming Tuesday evening and its performance.  And the central axis of that, to nearly every individual interest, was what such particular individual was to “be.”

They had asked Leslie to take the part of Zorayda in the “Three Moorish Princesses of the Alhambra.”  Jeannie and Elinor were to be Zayda and Zorahayda.  As for Leslie, she liked well enough, as we know, to look pretty; it was, or had been, till other thoughts of late had begun to “crowd it out,” something like a besetting weakness; she had only lately—­to tell the whole truth as it seldom is told—­begun to be ashamed, before her higher self, to turn, the first thing in the morning, with a certain half-mechanical anxiety toward her glass, to see how she was looking.  Without studying into separate causes of complexion and so forth, as older women given to these things come to do, she knew that somehow there was often a difference; and beside the standing question in her mind as to whether there were a chance of her growing up to anything like positive beauty or not, there was apt often to be a reason why she would like to-day, if possible, to be in particular good looks.  When she got an invitation, or an excursion was planned, the first thing that came into her head was naturally what she should wear; and a good deal of the pleasure would depend on that.  A party without an especially pretty dress didn’t amount to much; she couldn’t help that; it did count with everybody, and it made a difference.  She would like, undoubtedly, a “pretty part” in these tableaux; but there