am I to do, Honora?  There at the University I prepared myself for fine work, but I’m trapped here in this silly Silvertree cage.  If I had a talent I could make out very well, but I am talentless, and all I do now is to answer the telephone for father and help mummy embroider the towels.  They won’t let me do anything else.  Some one asked me the other day what colors I intended wearing this autumn.  I wanted to tell them smoke-of-disappointment, ashes-of-dreams, and dull-as-wash-Monday.  But I only said ashes-of-roses.  “‘Not all of your frocks, surely, Kate,’ one of the girls cried.  ‘All,’ I declared; ’street frocks, evening gowns, all.’  ‘But you mustn’t be odd,’ my little friend warned.  ’Especially as people are a little suspicious that you will be because of your going to a co-educational college.’

“I thought it would be so restful here, but it doesn’t offer peace so much as shrinkage.  Silvertree isn’t pastoral—­it’s merely small town.  Of course it is possible to imagine a small town that would be ideal—­a community of quiet souls leading the simple life.  But we aren’t great or quiet souls here, and are just as far from simple as our purses and experience will let us be.

“I dare say that you’ll be advising me, as a student of psychology, to stop criticizing and to try to do something for the neighbors here—­go in search of their submerged selves.  But, honestly, it would require too much paraphernalia in the way of diving-bells and air-pumps.

“I have, however, a reasonable cause of worry.  Dear little mummy isn’t well.  At first we thought her indisposition of little account, but she seems run down.  She has been flurried and nervous ever since I came home; indeed, I may say she has been so for years.  Now she seems suddenly to have broken down.  But I’m going to do everything I can for her, and I know father will, too; for he can’t endure to have any one sick.  It arouses his great virtue, his physicianship.”

* * * * *

     A week later Kate mailed this:—­

“I am turning to you in my terrible fear.  Mummy won’t answer our questions and seems lost in a world of thought.  Father has called in other physicians to help him.  I can’t tell you how like a frightened child I feel.  Oh, my poor little bewildered mummy!  What do you suppose she is thinking about?”

* * * * *

Then, a week afterward, this—­on black-bordered paper:—­

     “Sister Honora:—­

“She’s been gone three days.  To the last we couldn’t tell why she fell ill.  We only knew she made no effort to get well.  I am tormented by the fear that I had something to do with her breaking like that.  She was appalled—­shattered—­at the idea of any friction between father and me.  When I stood up for my own ideas against his, it was to her as sacrilegious as if I had lifted