but probably remembered from a long and comprehensive course of fiction as appropriate to the occasion, and Elfrida read between the lines with some impatience how largely their trouble was softened to her mother by the consideration that it would inevitably bring her back to them.  “We can bear it well if we bear it together,” wrote Mrs. Bell.  “You have always been our brave daughter, and your young courage will be invaluable to us now.  Your talents will be our flowers by the way-side.  We shall take the keenest possible delight in watching them expand, as, even under the cloud of financial adversity, we know they will.”

“Dear over-confident parent,” Elfrida reflected grimly at this point, “I must yet prove that I have any.”

Along with the situation she studied elaborately the third page of the Sparta Sentinel.  When it had arrived, months before, containing the best part of a long letter describing Paris, which she had written to her mother in the first freshness of her delighted impressions, she had glanced over it with half-amused annoyance at the foolish parental pride that suggested printing it.  She was already too remote from the life of Sparta to care very much one way or another, but such feeling as she had was of that sort.  And the compliments from the minister, from various members of the Browning Club, from the editor himself, that filtered through her mother’s letters during the next two or three weeks, made her shrug with their absolute irrelevance to the only praise that could thrill her and the only purpose she held dear.  Even now, when the printed lines contained the significance of a possible resource, she did not give so much as a thought to the flattering opinion of Sparta as her mother had conveyed it to her.  She read them over and over, relying desperately on her own critical sense and her knowledge of what the Paris correspondent of the Daily Dial thought of her chances in that direction.  He, Frank Parke, had told her once that if her brush failed she had only to try her pen, though he made use of no such commonplace as that.  He said it, too, at the end of half an hour’s talk with her, only half an hour.  Elfrida, when she wished to be exact with her vanity, told herself that it could not have been more than twenty-five minutes.  She wished for particular reasons to be exact with it now, and she did not fail to give proper weight to the fact that Frank Parke had never seen her before that day.  The Paris correspondent of the Daily Dial was well enough known to be of the monde, and rich enough to be as bourgeois as anybody.  Therefore some of the people who knew him thought it odd that at his age this gentleman should prefer the indelicacies of the Quartier to those of “tout Paris,” and the bad vermouth and cheap cigars of the Rue Luxembourg to the peculiarly excellent quality of champagne with which the president’s wife made her social atonement to the Faubourg St. Germain.  But it was so, and its being so rendered Frank Parke’s opinion that Miss Bell could write if she chose to try, not only supremely valuable to her, but available for the second time if necessary, which was perhaps more important.