“Just once, long ago when I was about eight years old.  We were passing through on our way east from California, and mother stayed for about a week at Delphi.  It’s a little college town on Lake Nadonis, about twelve miles inland from Lake Michigan, and perhaps sixty miles north of Chicago on the big bluffs that line the shore nearly all the way to Milwaukee.  Uncle Cassius was a first settler there, I believe.  You don’t have to be very old to have been a first settler in Wisconsin.  I think about the first thing he helped establish there was Hope College.  I don’t remember so very much about it, girls, it was so long ago.  I know I loved the bluffs and the little winding paths that led up from the shore below, but it seems to me Uncle Cassius’ house was rather cheerless and formal.  He was a good deal of a scholar and antiquarian.  Aunt Daphne seemed to me just a deprecating little shadow that trotted after him, and made life smooth.”

Kit listened with the attentive curiosity of a squirrel, and Jean, who knew every changing expression on her face, was sure she was having a little private debate with herself.

“I don’t think,” continued Mrs. Robbins, easily, “that it is such a misfortune after all our not having a boy to fill his order.  It wouldn’t be a very cheerful or sympathetic home for any young person.”

“Oh, but mother, dear,” Kit burst forth, eagerly.  “Think what glorious fun it would be to train them, and make them understand how much more interesting you can make life if you only take the right point of view.”

“Yes, but supposing what seemed to be the right point of view to you, Kit, was not the right point of view to them at all.  Every one looks at life from his own angle.”

“Carlota always said that, too,” Jean put in.  “I remember at our art class each student would see the subject from a different angle and sketch accordingly.  Carlota said it was exactly like life, where each one gets his own perspective.”

“But you can’t get any perspective at all if you shut yourself up in the dark,” Kit argued.  She leaned her chin on both palms, elbows planted firmly on the table, as she prepared to influence the opinion of the family.  “Now just listen to this, and don’t all speak at once until I get through.  You went away, Jean, down to New York, and then up to Boston, and though I say it as shouldn’t, right to your face, you came back to the bosom of your family, very much better satisfied and pleasanter to live with.  I think after you’ve stayed in one place too long you get, well—­as Billie says, ‘fed up’ and wish to goodness you could get away somewhere.  I haven’t any art at all, or anything special that I could wave at you and demand ‘expression’ as Bab Crane calls it.  What I need is something new to develop my special gifts and talents, and mother darling, if you would only consent to let me go for even two or three months, I will come back to you a perfect angel, besides doing Uncle Cassius and Aunt Daphne a pile of good, I know.”