But I was to have no privacy.

“Bab,” Sis said, in a more mild and fraternal tone, “I want you to do somthing for me.”

“Why don’t you go and get it yourself?” I said.  “Or ring for George?”

“I don’t want you to get anything.  I want you to go to father and mother for somthing.”

“I’d stand a fine chance to get it!” I said.  “Unless it’s Calomel or advice.”

Although not suspicous by nature, I now looked at her and saw why I had recieved the pink hoze.  It was not kindness.  It was bribery!

“It’s this,” she explained.  “The house we had last year at the seashore is emty and we can have it.  But mother won’t go.  She—­well, she won’t go.  They’re going to open the country house and stay there.”

A few days previously this would have been sad news for me, owing to not being allowed to go to the Country Club except in the mornings, and no chance to meet any new people, and no bathing save in the usual tub.  But now I thriled at the information, because the Grays have a place near the Club also.

For a moment I closed my eyes and saw myself, all in white and decked with flours, wandering through the meadows and on the links with a certain Person whose name I need not write, having allready related my feelings toward him.

I am older now by some weeks, older and sader and wiser.  For Tradgedy has crept into my life, so that somtimes I wonder if it is worth while to live on and suffer, especialy without an Allowence, and being again obliged to suplicate for the smallest things.

But I am being brave.  And, as Carter Brooks wrote me in a recent letter, acompanying a box of candy: 

“After all, Bab, you did your durndest.  And if they do not understand, I do, and I’m proud of you.  As for being `blited,’ as per your note to me, remember that I am, also.  Why not be blited together?”

This latter, of course, is not serious, as he is eight years older than I, and even fills in at middle-aged Dinners, being handsome and dressing well, although poor.

Sis’s remarks were interupted by the clamor of the door bell.  I placed a shaking hand over the Frat pin, beneath which my heart was beating only for him.  And waited.

What was my dispair to find it but Carter Brooks!

Now there had been a time when to have Carter Brooks sit beside me, as now, and treat me as fully out in Society, would have thriled me to the core.  But that day had gone.  I realized that he was not only to old, but to flirtatous.  He was one who would not look on a woman’s Love as precious, but as a plaything.

“Barbara,” he said to me.  “I do not beleive that Sister is glad to see me.”

“I don’t have to look at you,” Sis said, “I can knit.”

“Tell me, Barbara,” he said to me beseachingly, “am I as hard to look at as all that?”

“I rather like looking at you,” I rejoined with cander.  “Across the room.”