pleased in advance.

Elfrida allowed one extenuating point in her indictment
of Sparta: the place had produced her as she was at
eighteen, when they sent her to Philadelphia. This was
only half conscious--she was able to formulate it later
--but it influenced her sincere and vigorous disdain of
the town correctively, and we may believe that it operated
to except her father and mother from the general wreck
of her opinion to a greater extent than any more ordinary
feeling did. It was not in the least a sentiment of
affection for her birthplace; if she could have chosen
she would very much have preferred to be born somewhere
else. It was simply an important qualifying circumstance.
Her actual and her ideal self, her most mysterious and
interesting self, had originated in the air and the
opportunities of Sparta. Sparta had even done her the
service of showing her that she was unusual, by contrast,
and Elfrida felt that she ought to be thankful to somebody
or something for being as unusual as she was. She had
had a comfortable, spoiled feeling of gratitude for it
before she went to Philadelphia, which had developed in
the meantime into a shudder at the mere thought of what
it meant to be an ordinary person. "I could bear not to
be charming," said she sometimes to her Philadelphia
looking-glass, "but I could _not_ bear not to be clever."

She said "clever," but she meant more than that. Elfrida
Bell believed that something other than cleverness entered
into her personal equation. She looked sometimes into
her very soul to see what, but the writing there was in
strange characters that faded under her eyes, leaving
her uncomprehending but tranced. Meanwhile art spoke to
her from all sides, finding her responsive and more
responsive. Some books, some pictures, some music brought
her a curious exalted sense of double life. She could
not talk about it at all, but she could slip out into
the wet streets on a gusty October evening, and walk
miles exulting in it, and in the light on the puddles
and in the rain on her face, coming back, it must be
admitted, with red cheeks and an excellent appetite. It
led her into strange absent silences and ways of liking
to be alone, which gratified her mother and worried her
father. When Elfrida burned the gas of Sparta late in
her own room, it was always her father who saw the light
under the door, and who came and knocked and told her
that it was after eleven, and high time she was in