by their own ill-judged and ill-regulated reading, were found fallen into lives of vice.  Have our women, old or young, who make and circumscribe the opportunities of social intercourse and enjoyment, nothing to search out here, and help, as well, or as soon as, to get their names put on committee lists, and manage these public schools themselves, which educate and stimulate up to the point of possible fierce temptation, and then have nothing more that they can do?

It was a good thing for Desire Ledwith to grow intimate, as she did, with Rosamond Holabird.  There were identical points of character between the two.  They were both so real.

“You don’t want to play anything,” Barbara Holabird had said to Rosamond once, in some little discussion of social appearances and pretensions.  “And that’s the beauty of you!”

It was the beauty of Desire Ledwith also; only, with Rosamond, her ambitions had clothed themselves with a grace and delicateness that would have their own perfect and thorough as far as it went; and with Desire, the same demands of true living had chafed into an impatience with shams and a blunt disregard of and resistance to all conventionalisms.

“You are a good deal alike, you two,” Kenneth Kincaid said to them one day, in a talk they all three happened to have together.

And he had told Rosamond afterward that there was “something grand in Desire Ledwith; only grand things almost always have to grow with struggles.”

Rosamond had told this again to Desire.

It was not much wonder that she began to be happier; to have a hidden comfort of feeling that perhaps the “waiting with all her might” was nearly over, and the “by and by” was blossoming for her, though the green leaves of her own shy sternness with herself folded close down about the sweetening place, and she never parted them aside to see where the fragrance came from.

* * * * *

They were going to have a grand, large, beautiful supper party in the woods.

Mrs. Holabird and Mrs. Hobart were the matrons, and gave out the invitations.

“I don’t think I could possibly spend a Tuesday afternoon with a little ‘t,’” said Mrs. Lewis Marchbanks laughing, and tossing down poor, dear, good Mrs. Hobart’s note upon her table.  “It is rather more than is to be expected!”

“Doctor and Mrs. Hautayne are here, and Dakie Thayne is home from West Point.  It will be rather a nice party.”

“The Holabirds seem to have got everything into their own hands,” said Mrs. Marchbanks, haughtily.  “It is always a pity when people take the lead who are not exactly qualified.  Mrs. Holabird will not discriminate!’

“I think the Holabirds are splendid,” spoke up Lily, “and I don’t think there’s any fun in sticking up by ourselves!  I can’t bear to be judicious!”

Poor little Lily Marchbanks had been told a tiresome many times that she must be “judicious” in her intimacies.