ly pocketed his penknife.
"Shall we go downstairs now?" he suggested. "Fix your
brooch, mother; it's just on the drop."

Elfrida Bell had been a long year away--a year that seemed
longer to her than it possibly could to anybody in Sparta,
as she privately reflected when her father made this
observation for the second and the third time. Sparta
accounted for its days chiefly in ledgers, the girl
thought; there was a rising and a going down of the sun,
a little eating and drinking and speedy sleeping, a little
discussion of the newspapers. Sparta got over its days
by strides and stretches, and the strides and stretches
seemed afterward to have been made over gaps and gulfs
full of emptiness. The year divided itself and got its
painted leaves, its white silences, its rounding buds,
and its warm fragrances from the winds of heaven, and so
there were four seasons in Sparta, and people talked of
an early spring or a late fall; but Elfrida told herself
that time had no other division, and the days no other
color. Elfrida seemed to be unaware of the opening of
the new South Ward Episcopal Methodist Church. She
overlooked the municipal elections too, the plan for
overhauling the town waterworks, and the reorganization
of the public library. She even forgot the Browning Club.

Whereas--though Elfrida would never have said "whereas"
--the days in Philadelphia had been long and full. She
had often lived a week in one of them, and there had been
hours that stretched themselves over an infinity of life
and feeling, as Elfrida saw it, looking back. In reality,
her experience had been usual enough and poor enough;
but it had fed her in a way, and she enriched it with
her imagination, and thought, with keen and sincere pity,
that she had been starved till then. The question that
preoccupied her when she moved out of the Philadelphia
station in the Chicago train was that of future sustenance.
It was under the surface of her thoughts when she kissed
her father and mother and was made welcome home; it raised
a mute remonstrance against Mr. Bell's cheerful prophecy
that she would be content to stay in Sparta for a while
now, and get to know the young society; it neutralized
the pleasure of the triumphs in the packing-box. Besides,
their real delight had all been exhaled at the students'
exhibition in Philadelphia, when Philadelphia looked at
them. The opinion of Sparta, Elfrida thought, was not a
matter for anxiety. Sparta would be