Although naturaly no one wishes to sleep for a Century, or even approxamately.

There was Strife in the house.  The first way I noticed it, aside from Hannah’s anonamous remark, was by observing that Leila was mopeing.  She acted very strangely, giving me a pair of pink hoze without more than a hint on my part, and not sending me out of the room when Carter Brooks came in to tea the next day.

I had staid at home, fearing that if I went out I should purchace some crepe de Chene combinations I had been craving in a window, and besides thinking it possable that Tom would drop in to renew our relations of yesterday, not remembering that there was a Ball Game.

Mother having gone out to the Country Club, I put my hair on top of my head, thus looking as adult as possable.  Taking a new detective story of Jane’s under my arm, I descended the staircase to the library.

Sis was there, curled up in a chair, knitting for the soldiers.  Having forgoten the Ball Game, as I have stated, I asked her, in case I had a caller, to go away, which, considering she has the house to herself all winter, I considered not to much.

“A caller!” she said.  “Since when have you been allowed to have callers?”

I looked at her steadily.

“I am young,” I observed, “and still in the school room, Leila.  I admit it, so don’t argue.  But as I have not taken the veil, and as this is not a Penitentary, I darsav I can see my friends now and anon, especialy when they live next door.”

“Oh!” she said.  “It’s the Gray infant, is it!”

This remark being purely spiteful, I ignored it and sat down to my book, which concerned the stealing of some famous Emerelds, the heroine being a girl detective who could shoot the cork out of a bottle at a great distance, and whose name was Barbara!

It was for that reason Jane had loaned me the book.

I had reached the place where the Duchess wore the Emerelds to a ball, above white satin and lillies, the girl detective being dressed as a man and driving her there, because the Duchess had been warned and hautily refused to wear the paste copies she had—­when Sis said, peavishly: 

“Why don’t you knit or do somthing useful, Bab?”

I do not mind being picked on by my parents or teachers, knowing it is for my own good.  But I draw the line at Leila.  So I replied: 

“Knit!  If that’s the scarf you were on at Christmas, and it looks like it, because there’s the crooked place you wouldn’t fix, let me tell you that since then I have made three socks, heals and all, and they are probably now on the feet of the Allies.”

“Three!” she said.  “Why three?”

“I had no more wool, and there are plenty of one-leged men anyhow.”

I would fane have returned to my book, dreaming between lines, as it were, of the Romanse which had come into my life the day before.  It is, I have learned, much more interesting to read a book when one has, or is, experiencing the Tender Passion at the time.  For during the love seens one can then fancy that the impasioned speaches are being made to oneself, by the object of one’s afection.  In short, one becomes, even if but a time, the Heroine.