e as sure to
assert themselves as if the friends were of different sexes.

On all common occasions Euthymia looked up to her friend as her superior.
She fully appreciated all her varied gifts and knowledge, and deferred to
her opinion in every-day matters, not exactly as an oracle, but as wiser
than herself or any of her other companions. It was a different thing,
however, when the graver questions of life came up. Lurida was full of
suggestions, plans, projects, which were too liable to run into whims
before she knew where they were tending. She would lay out her ideas
before Euthymia so fluently and eloquently that she could not help
believing them herself, and feeling as if her friend must accept them
with an enthusiasm like her own. Then Euthymia would take them up with
her sweet, deliberate accents, and bring her calmer judgment to bear on
them.

Lurida was in an excited condition, in the midst of all her new interests
and occupations. She was constantly on the lookout for papers to be read
at the meetings of her Society,--for she made it her own in great
measure, by her zeal and enthusiasm,--and in the mean time she was
reading in various books which Dr. Butts selected for her, all bearing on
the profession to which, at least as a possibility, she was looking
forward. Privately and in a very still way, she was occupying herself
with the problem of the young stranger, the subject of some delusion, or
disease, or obliquity of unknown nature, to which the vague name of
antipathy had been attached. Euthymia kept an eye upon her, partly in
the fear that over-excitement would produce some mental injury, and
partly from anxiety lest she should compromise her womanly dignity in her
desire to get at the truth of a very puzzling question.

"How do you like the books I see you reading?" said Euthymia to Lurida,
one day, as they met at the Library.

"Better than all the novels I ever read," she answered. "I have been
reading about the nervous system, and it seems to me I have come nearer
the springs of life than ever before in all my studies. I feel just as
if I were a telegraph operator. I was sure that I had a battery in my
head, for I know my brain works like one; but I did not know how many
centres of energy there are, and how they are played upon by all sorts of
influences, external and internal. Do you know, I believe I could solve
the riddle of the 'Arrowhead Village Sphinx,' as the paper called him, if
he would on