“I shall take mine,” Ruth Erskine said with determination.  “I don’t intend to be bored by being without baggage.  It is horrid, I think, to go away with only one dress, and feel obliged to wear it whether it is suited to the weather or not, or whatever happens to it.  Eurie, what are you laughing at?”

“I am interested in the phenomena of Marion Wilbur being the first to introduce the dress question.  I venture to say not one of us has thought of that phase of the matter up to this present moment.”

While the talk went on the collars and cuffs were carefully washed and rinsed, and presently Marion, with her hands only a trifle pinker for the operation, was ready to lean against a chair and discuss ways and means.  Her long apprenticeship in school-rooms had given her the habit of standing instead of sitting, even when there was no occasion for the former.

If these four young ladies had been creatures of the brain, gotten up expressly for the purpose of illustrating extremes of character, instead of being flesh and blood creations, I doubt whether they could have better illustrated the different types of young ladyhood.  There was Ruth Erskine, dwelling in solitary grandeur in her royal home, as American royalty goes, the sole daughter, the sole child indeed of the house, a girl who had no idea of life except as a place in which to have a serenely good time, and teach everybody to do as she desired them to.  Money was a commonplace matter-of-course article, neither to be particularly prized nor despised; it was convenient, of course, and must be an annoyance when one had to do without it; but of that, by practical experience, she knew nothing.  Yet Ruth was by no means a “pink-and-white” girl without character; on the contrary, she had plenty of character, but hitherto it had been frittered away on nothings, until it looked as much like nothing as it could.  She was the sort of person whom education and circumstances of the right sort would have developed into splendor, but the development had not taken place.  Now you are not to suppose that she was uneducated; that would be a libel on Madame La Fonte and her fashionable seminary.  She had graduated with honor; taken the first prizes in everything.  She knew all about seminaries; so do I; and if you do, you are ready to admit that the development had not come.  There is constantly occurring something to take back.  While I write I have in mind an institution where the earnest desire sought after and prayed for is the higher development, not alone of the intellect, but of the heart:  where the wonderful woman who is at its head said to me a few years ago: