“Well, there is a something about marriage,” Julia admitted; “you may not have any reason for feeling so, but you do feel superior, ’way down in your secret heart!  And yet, Babbie,” and a little shadow darkened her bright face, “and yet, once you are married, you see a sort of—­well, a sort of uncompromising brightness about girlhood, too!  When I go out to The Alexander now, and remember my old busy days there, and walking to chapel with Aunt Sanna, in the fresh, early mornings—­I don’t know—­it makes me almost a little sad!”

“Don’t speak of it,” said Barbara.  “When I think of leaving Dad, and home, and going off to England, and having to make friends of awful women with high cheek bones, and mats of crimps coming down to their eyebrows, it scares me to death!”

And both girls laughed gayly.  They were having tea in Julia’s drawing-room on a cold bright afternoon in May.

“I’ll miss Dad most,” pursued Barbara seriously.  “Mother’s so much with Ted now, anyway.”  She frowned at the fire.  “Mother’s curious, Ju,” she added presently.  “Every one says she’s an ideal mother, and so on, and I suppose she is, but—­”

“You’re more like your father, anyway,” Julia suggested in the pause.

“It’s not only that,” said Barbara slowly, “but Mother has never been in sympathy with any one of us!  Ned deceived her, Sally deceived her, Theodora went deliberately against her advice, and broke her heart, and Con and Jane don’t really respect her opinion at all!  I’m the oldest, her first born—­”

“And she loves you dearly,” Julia said soothingly.

“Used to Ju, when I was a baby.  And loves me theoretically now.  But she has taken my not marrying to heart much more than the curious marriages Ned and the girls have made!  Hints about old maids, and stories about her own popularity as a girl, regardless of the fact that no one wanted me—­”

“Oh, Babbie!”

“Well, no one did!” Barbara laughed a little dryly.  “Why, not two months ago,” she went on, “that little sprig of a Paul Smith called on Con, and Mother engineered me out of the room, and said something laughingly to Richie and Ted about not wanting to stand in Con’s way, ‘one old maid was enough in a family!’”

“Maddening!  Yes, I know,” Julia said, laughing and shaking her head.  “I’ve heard her a hundred times!”

“Of course it’s all love and kisses, now,” Barbara added, “and Francis is a bold, big thief, and how can she give up her dear big girl—­”

“Oh, Barbara, don’t be bitter!”

“Well,” Barbara flung her head back as if she tossed the subject aside, “I suppose I am bitter!  And why you’re not, Ju, I can’t understand, for you never had one tenth the chance I did!”