ever had to crack. He had only the vaguest
notions as to what was necessary for a girl's career, and imagined that
by sending his daughter to a fashionable Eastern school, he was getting
at the heart of the solution. Charlotte wanted to study music, "not
like a boarding-school miss," she told Nancy. "I want to make it the
real thing. I tell you I don't know anything about it--but I'm going
to, yet." Old Mr. Spencer, while he had no objections to one of the
arts as a ladylike accomplishment, felt that it was not exactly
respectable for a girl to go into it seriously, just why, he would have
been at a loss to say. "You know," Charlotte had explained, with her
humorous smile, "there is a notion that it's all right for a 'lady' to
dabble in anything, painting, music, or embroidery and so on, so long
as she doesn't attempt to make a profession of it, or think of making
money by it. Of course this idea is changing now a bit, but people
like Mildred Lloyd, for instance, and all her kind, still think it's
not perfectly '_nice_' as she puts it." It was not in the least that
Mr. Spencer had even a grain of snobbishness in his rough, vigorous
makeup, so far as either himself or his three sons were concerned; his
very love for his "Charlie," as he called her, made him stubborn in his
ideas concerning what was best for her. He wanted her to have
everything that he could give her, and he gave her what he imagined her
mother would have wanted him to give. It was because Charlotte
understood that his stubbornness grew out of his adoration of her, that
she good-naturedly gave in to his wishes.

"In good time, I'll do what I want, of course," she said with serene
self-confidence. "But the least I can do for darling old Dad is to
make him believe that all the time I'm doing what _he_ wants. He _is_
such a lamb, you know."

The warm friendship that grew up between the two girls had a strong
bond in the similarity of their position at Miss Leland's, and in the
circumstances of their being there, as well as in their mutual sympathy
with each other's ideas.

It was a Saturday afternoon, late in October, when the days were
rapidly shortening into wintry dusks, and there was even the hint of an
early snow in the slate-colored skies, against which the bare, stiff
branches of the trees shivered in a nipping wind. Nancy, all ruddy,
and breezy from a brisk walk with Charlotte, had come up to her room to
finish an English paper. Acr