elderly girlhood by Octave Thanet, or that by Miss Alice Brown, the one with its ideality, and the other with its humor.  The pathos of “The Perfect Year” is as true as either in its truth to the girlhood which “never knew an earthly close,” and yet had its fill of rapture.  Julian Ralph’s strong and free sketch contributes a fresh East Side flower, hollyhock-like in its gaudiness, to the garden of American girls, Irish-American in this case, but destined to be companioned hereafter by blossoms of our Italian-American, Yiddish-American, and Russian-American civilization, as soon as our nascent novelists shall have the eye to see and the art to show them.  Meantime, here are some of our Different Girls as far as they or their photographers have got, and their acquaintance is worth having.

     W.D.H.

The Little Joys of Margaret

BY RICHARD LE GALLIENNE

Margaret had seen her five sisters one by one leave the family nest, to set up little nests of their own.  Her brother, the eldest child of a family of seven, had left the old home almost beyond memory, and settled in London.  Now and again he made a flying visit to the small provincial town of his birth, and sometimes he sent two little daughters to represent him—­for he was already a widowed man, and relied occasionally on the old roof-tree to replace the lost mother.  Margaret had seen what sympathetic spectators called her “fate” slowly approaching for some time—­particularly when, five years ago, she had broken off her engagement with a worthless boy.  She had loved him deeply, and, had she loved him less, a refined girl in the provinces does not find it easy to replace a discarded suitor—­for the choice of young men is not excessive.  Her sisters had been more fortunate, and so, as I have said, one by one they left their father’s door in bridal veils.  But Margaret stayed on, and at length, as had been foreseen, became the sole nurse of a beautiful old invalid mother, a kind of lay sister in the nunnery of home.

She came of a beautiful family.  In all the big family of seven there was not one without some kind of good looks.  Two of her sisters were acknowledged beauties, and there were those who considered Margaret the most beautiful of all.  It was all the harder, such sympathizers said, that her youth should thus fade over an invalid’s couch, the bloom of her complexion be rubbed out by arduous vigils, and the lines prematurely etched in her skin by the strain of a self-denial proper, no doubt, to homely girls and professional nurses, but peculiarly wanton and wasteful in the case of a girl so beautiful as Margaret.

There are, alas! a considerable number of women predestined by their lack of personal attractiveness for the humbler tasks of life.  Instinctively we associate them with household work, nursing, and the general drudgery of existence.  One never dreams of their having a life of their own.  They have no accomplishments, nor any of the feminine charms.  Women to whom an offer of marriage would seem as terrifying as a comet, they belong to the neutrals of the human hive, and are, practically speaking, only a little higher than the paid domestic.  Indeed, perhaps their one distinction is that they receive no wages.