yself! Wasn't I ever to be allowed to have my
own opinions and exercise my own judgment? It seemed not! Thus spoke
superior sixteen.

As for clothes!--I remember distinctly the dreary November rainstorm
of the morning I reproachfully accused Mother of wanting to make me
back into a stupid little Mary, just because she so uncompromisingly
disapproved of the beaded chains and bangles and jeweled combs and
spangled party dresses that "every girl in school" was wearing. Why,
the idea! Did she want me to dress like a little frump of a country
girl? It seems she did.

Poor mother! Dear mother! I wonder how she kept her patience at all.
But she kept it. I remember that distinctly, too.

It was that winter that I went through the morbid period. Like our
childhood's measles and whooping cough, it seems to come to most of
us--us women children. I wonder why? Certainly it came to me. True to
type I cried by the hour over fancied slights from my schoolmates, and
brooded days at a time because Father or Mother "didn't understand," I
questioned everything in the earth beneath and the heavens above;
and in my dark despair over an averted glance from my most intimate
friend, I meditated on whether life was, or was not, worth the living,
with a preponderance toward the latter.

Being plunged into a state of settled gloom, I then became acutely
anxious as to my soul's salvation, and feverishly pursued every ism
and ology that caught my roving eye's attention, until in one short
month I had become, in despairing rotation, an incipient agnostic,
atheist, pantheist, and monist. Meanwhile I read Ibsen, and wisely
discussed the new school of domestic relationships.

Mother--dear mother!--looked on aghast. She feared, I think, for my
life; certainly for my sanity and morals.

It was Father this time who came to the rescue. He pooh-poohed
Mother's fears; said it was indigestion that ailed me, or that I was
growing too fast; or perhaps I didn't get enough sleep, or needed,
maybe, a good tonic. He took me out of school, and made it a point to
accompany me on long walks. He talked with me--not _to_ me--about the
birds and the trees and the sunsets, and then about the deeper things
of life, until, before I realized it, I was sane and sensible once
more, serene and happy in the simple faith of my childhood, with all
the isms and ologies a mere bad dream in the dim past.

I was seventeen, if I remember rightly, when I became worried, not
ove