Sis got some lovely Clothes, mostly imported, but they had a woman come in and sow for me.  Hannah and she used to interupt my most precious Moments at my desk by running a tape measure around me, or pinning a paper pattern to me.  The sowing woman always had her mouth full of Pins, and once, owing to my remarking that I wished I had been illagitimate, so I could go away and live my own life, she swallowed one.  It caused a grate deal of excitement, with Hannah blaming me and giving her vinigar to swallow to soften the pin.  Well, it turned out all right, for she kept on living, but she pretended to have sharp pains all over her here and there, and if the pin had been as lively as a tadpole and wriggled from spot to spot, it could not have hurt in so many Places.

Of course they blamed me, and I shut myself up more and more in my Sanctuery.  There I lived with the creatures of my dreams, and forgot for a while that I was only a Sub-Deb, and that Leila’s last year’s tennis clothes were being fixed over for me.

But how true what dear Shakspeare says: 

                         dreams,
     Which are the children of an idle brain. 
     Begot of nothing but vain fantasy.

I loved my dreams, but alas, they were not enough.  After a tortured hour or two at my desk, living in myself the agonies of my characters, suffering the pangs of the wife with two husbands and both living, struggling in the water with the children, fruit of the first union, dying with number two and blowing my last Bubbles heavenward—­after all these emotions, I was done out.

Jane came in one day and found me prostrate on my couch, with a light of sufering in my eyes.

“Dearest!” cried Jane, and gliding to my side, fell on her knees.

“Jane!”

“What is it?  You are ill?”

I could hardly more than whisper.  In a low tone I said: 

“He is dead.”

“Dearest!”

“Drowned!”

At first she thought I meant a member of my Familey.  But when she understood she looked serious.

“You are too intence, Bab,” she said solemly.  “You suffer too much.  You are wearing yourself out.”

“There is no other way,” I replied in broken tones.

Jane went to the Mirror and looked at herself.  Then she turned to me.

“Others don’t do it.”

“I must work out my own Salvation, Jane,” I observed firmly.  But she had roused me from my apathy, and I went into Sis’s room, returning with a box of candy some one had sent her.  “I must feel, Jane, or I cannot write.”

“Pooh!  Loads of writers get fat on it.  Why don’t you try Comedy?  It pays well.”

“Oh—­money!” I said, in a disgusted tone.

“Your Forte, of course, is Love,” she said.  “Probably that’s because you’ve had so much experience.”  Owing to certain reasons it is generaly supposed that I have experienced the gentle Passion.  But not so, alas!  “Bab,” Jane said, suddenly, “I have been your friend for a long time.  I have never betrayed you.  You can trust me with your Life.  Why don’t you tell me?”