sensitive, and for her
to stand on the platform in one of those plain ginghams would be too
cruel."

"Then, too," said Miss Acton, "she would recite her verses exactly like
Lily Jennings. She can make her voice exactly like Lily's now. Then
everybody would laugh, and Amelia would not know why. She would think
they were laughing at her dress, and that would be dreadful."

If Amelia's mother could have heard that conversation everything would
have been different, although it is puzzling to decide in what way.

It was the last of the summer vacation in early September, just before
school began, that a climax came to Amelia's idolatry and imitation of
Lily. The Jenningses had not gone away that summer, so the two little
girls had been thrown together a good deal. Mrs. Diantha never went away
during a summer. She considered it her duty to remain at home, and she
was quite pitiless to herself when it came to a matter of duty.

However, as a result she was quite ill during the last of August and the
first of September. The season had been unusually hot, and Mrs. Diantha
had not spared herself from her duty on account of the heat. She
would have scorned herself if she had done so. But she could not,
strong-minded as she was, avert something like a heat prostration after
a long walk under a burning sun, nor weeks of confinement and idleness
in her room afterward.

When September came, and a night or two of comparative coolness, she
felt stronger; still she was compelled by most unusual weakness to
refrain from her energetic trot in her duty-path; and then it was that
something happened.

One afternoon Lily fluttered over to Amelia's, and Amelia, ever on the
watch, spied her.

"May I go out and see Lily?" she asked Grandmother Stark.

"Yes, but don't talk under the windows; your mother is asleep."

Amelia ran out.

"I declare," said Grandmother Stark to Grandmother Wheeler, "I was half
a mind to tell that child to wait a minute and slip on one of those
pretty dresses. I hate to have her go on the street in that old gingham,
with that Jennings girl dressed up like a wax doll."

"I know it."

"And now poor Diantha is so weak--and asleep--it would not have annoyed
her."

"I know it."

Grandmother Stark looked at Grandmother Wheeler. Of the two she
possessed a greater share of original sin compared with the size of
her soul. Moreover, she felt herself at liberty to circumvent her
own daughter. Whispering, she unfo