r best I can."

Well-a-day, it is always easier to answer the riddles that puzzle others,
rather than those that confront ourselves.

Fully a year ago Mrs. Jenks-Smith gave me a well-meaning hint that it is
not "good form" for me to allow father or Evan to smoke while we drive
or walk in public together. The very next night we three happened to be
dining, why I don't know, at the most socially advanced house on the
Bluffs. When the moment came for the midway pause in the rotation of
foods, that we might tamp down and make secure what we had already eaten
by the aid of Roman punch, the gentlemen very nearly discounted the
effort, as far as I was concerned at least, by smoking cigarettes,
leaning easily back in their chairs, and with no more than a vague "by
your leave," to the ladies. What was more, there was a peculiarly
sickening sweet odour to the smoke that father afterward told me was
because the tobacco was tinctured with opium. Yet it is "bad form" for
Evan and father to smoke in my society, out in the road or street under
the big generous roof of the sky. Dear little boys, I wonder what the
custom will be when you are grown, and read your mother's social
experience book?

* * * * *

The present crisis to be faced is in the form of a wedding,--an
apple-blossom wedding, to take place in St. Peter's Church. I have
been made a confident in the matter from the very beginning of the
wayside comedy which led to it; but I wish it understood that I am
not responsible for the list of invited guests, or the details of
the ceremony, which have been laboriously compiled from many
sources, any more than I shall be for the heartburnings that are
sure to follow in its wake.

* * * * *

One morning early last summer Fannie Penney was driving home from town,
with a rather lopsided load of groceries on the back of the buckboard.
Fanny did not enjoy these weekly trips for groceries, but she did not
rebel, as her sisters did; and though she had aspirations, they had not
developed as quickly in her as in the others, for she was considered
already an old maid (a state that in the country, strangely enough, sets
in long before it does in the city, often beginning quite at noonday) at
the time the Bluff colony began to attract attention.

The Penney family live in a plain but substantial house on the main road,
a little way north of the village, where Mr. Penney combin