Alma laughed unwillingly. She was a dainty and singularly pretty
girl--a little bit foolish, and a good bit of a snob, but Nancy adored
her, though she enjoyed making good-natured digs at Alma's weak spots.

They took up their bundles, said good-night to Mr. Simpson, and went
out.

It was a walk of three miles from the village--or, as it preferred to
be called--the town of Melbrook to the Prescotts' house, which lay in
the country beyond, a modest little nest enough, where the two girls
had grown up almost isolated by their poverty from the gay life of the
younger Melbrookians. Alma chafed unhappily against this isolation,
chafed against every reminder of their poverty, and, like her mother,
once a beauty and a belle, craved the excitement of admiration, luxury
and fine things. She was ashamed of the little house, which was
shabby, it is true, ashamed of having to wear old clothes, and made
herself wretched by envying the richer girls of the neighborhood their
beautiful houses, their horses and their endless round of gay times.
As Nancy once told her mother, in affectionate reproof, they were
always trying to "play rich"--Mrs. Prescott and Alma. She had tried to
teach Alma her own secret of finding life pleasant; but Alma did not
love books, nor long solitary walks through the summer woods; and
Nancy's ambition of fitting herself to meet the world and make her own
living seemed to both Alma and her mother dreary and unfeminine.
Somewhere, in the back of her pretty head, Mrs. Prescott cherished the
hope and the belief that the two girls would find some way of coming
into what she called "their own"--not by Nancy's independent plan of
action, but through some easier, pleasanter course. She shuddered at
the idea of their making their own living, and opposed Nancy's wish to
go to college on the ground that no men liked blue-stocking women, and
that therefore Nancy would be an old maid.

"But, Mother darling, we can't just sit back and wait for some young
millionaire to come and carry us off?" Nancy would plead, shaking her
head. Time was flying, and Nancy was seventeen, and eager to begin her
own life. "Let me go--I can work my way through, and Alma can stay at
home with you."

"I need you to help me with Alma," was Mrs. Prescott's answer. Nancy
felt helpless. Her father, before her, had to his sorrow recognized
the hopelessness of driving any common-sense views into Mrs. Prescott's
pretty, silly little head