een looking for herself. But though in the
meantime she had learned how to meet men and how to treat them--capably,
Elsie Gossamer said--she had not found herself. During the past summer,
since her return from college, she had idled on here through a little
interim with her father, comfortable, dreamy, waiting, seeking. But she
had not found herself.

As she began to make ready for bed that Sunday night she had, suddenly
and subtly, a quiver of consciousness that the waiting and the seeking
were nearly over. Just how she knew it she could not have told, or just
what she meant by knowing it, or just what would happen because of
knowing it. Moving about the large room softly, her harmonious strength
and grace were revealed in the swing of her long lithe limbs, the reach
of her satiny brown arms, the breadth of her sweet smooth breast, the
straightness and firmness of her tall frame. Only a self-reliant girl
could have moved as she moved, a girl made self-reliant by exuberant
health and ideals and hope. When she stopped moving about and stood
before her mirror, her hand on the great rope of shining hair that hung
over her shoulder, her body assumed a rare natural poise, classically,
ancestrally beautiful, Grecian. By and by she roused from the little
reverie before the mirror, put out the light, and came over to the
window.

"Oh," she cried at once, "that was what was the matter with me, that was
why I felt that something was about to happen! It was the storm!"

Beyond the window a Missouri tempest was rising. The girl, responsive
as a reed to the wind, sat down in a low chair, the subtle quiver of
consciousness intensified within her, and watched the lightning that
began to play over the hills, and the rain that began to beat through
the trees. Strangely enough, as she sat there, in the flashes she could
see little, but in the dark--a warm, wind-blown, sweet-smelling
dark--she saw several things. For one thing, she saw that, most
probably, she would never again in her life spend an evening with a
sixteen-to-one congressman. It had been a very tiresome evening. For
another thing, she saw that she was not going to Europe. Her father
needed her; or if he didn't he ought to. For a third thing, she saw
that, in some way, she was going to have to make her father like Bruce
Steering again. Then she saw the fourth thing. There had not been a
flash for some minutes. Seeing that fourth thing, in the intense dark,
she gave a trem