For four years they had lived in the rarified atmosphere of celestial friendship.  They clothed their bodies in the same raiment, and their minds in the same thoughts, and when one was cold the other shivered.

If Miss Lucinda, in those early days found it difficult to live up to Miss Joe Hill’s transcendental code she gave no sign of it.  She laid aside her mildly adorned garments and enveloped her small angular person in a garb of sombre severity.  Even the modest bird that adorned her hat was replaced by an uncompromising band.  She foreswore meat and became a vegetarian.  She stopped reading novels and devoted her spare time to essays and biography.  In fact she and Miss Joe Hill became one and that one was Miss Joe Hill.

It was not until Floss Speckert entered the senior class at Locustwood Seminary that this sublimated friendship suffered a jar.

Floss’s father lived in Chicago, and it was due to his unerring discernment in the buying and selling of live stock that Floss was being “finished” in all branches without regard to the cost.

“Learn her all you want to,” he said magnanimously to Miss Lucinda, who negotiated the arrangement.  “I ain’t got but two children, her and Tom.  He’s just like me—­don’t know a blame thing but business; but Floss—­” his bosom swelled under his checked vest—­“she’s on to it all.  I pay for everything you get into her head.  Dancin’, singin’, French—­all them extries goes.”

Miss Lucinda had consequently undertaken the management of Floss Speckert, and the result had been far-reaching in its consequences.

Floss was a person whose thoughts did not dwell upon the highest development of the spiritual life.  Her mind was given over to the pursuit of worldly amusements, her only serious thought being a burning ambition to win histrionic honors.  The road to this led naturally through the elocution classes, and Floss accepted Miss Lucinda as the only means toward the desired end.

A drop of water in a bottle of ink produces no visible result, but a drop of ink in a glass of water contaminates it at once.  Miss Lucinda took increasing interest in her frivolous young pupil; she listened with half-suppressed eagerness to unlimited gossip about stage-land, and even sank to the regular perusal of certain bold theatrical papers.  She was unmistakably becoming contaminated.

Meanwhile Miss Joe Hill, quite blind to the situation, condoned the friendship.  “You are developing your own character,” she told Miss Lucinda.  “You are exercising self-control and forbearance in dealing with that crude, undisciplined girl.  Florence is the natural outcome of common stock and newly acquired riches.  It is your noble aspiration to take this vulgar clay and mold it into something higher.  Your motive is laudable, Lucinda; your self-sacrifice in giving up our evening hour together is heroic.  I read you like an open book, dear.”

And Miss Lucinda listened and trembled.  They were standing together before the window of their rigid little sitting room, the chastened severity of which banished all ideas of comfort.  “What purpose do you serve?” Miss Joe Hill demanded of every article that went into her apartment, and many of the comforts of life failed to pass the examination.