eciation of her mother's uneasiness.

"Oh, Grace!" shrilled the thin woman. "Get down this instant! Or do
you want me to bring you a ladder?"

An appreciative giggle arose from some of the girls below. Grace
turned rather red around her ears, and began to descend. It was one
thing to make her mother marvel; she did not want her "act" to be
turned to ridicule.

"They look real pretty--now don't they?" admitted Mrs. Pendleton,
loftily, after surveying the gymnasium for some time through her
lorgnette. "Lily's dress cost us a deal of trouble. But she looks well
in it. She's well developed for her age and--thank goodness!--she has
a _chic_ way with her.

"I thought we never would get the suit to fit her. And she changed her
shoes three times," added the society matron. "Finally I told her if
she was going to have nervous prostration getting ready to take
physical culture, she'd better wait and take it when she was
convalescent."

"I hope Lluella will be careful of her hands," said the fleshy lady on
Mrs. Belding's right. "She's always bruising or cutting her fingers.
Just like her aunt. Her aunt always had to wear gloves doing her
housework."

"There! they are going to march," cried the thin lady, as Mrs. Case
blew her whistle and the girl on the rope slid the last few feet to
the floor. "Grace is down, thank goodness!"

"Her music teacher says Grace's ear is a regular gift--she keeps such
good time."

"I'm sure no sensible parent would ever have _bought_ those ears,"
whispered Mrs. Pendleton to Mrs. Belding. "They must have been a
gift," for those organs on the agile Grace were painfully prominent.

"But she had _such_ a pretty smile when she looked up at her mother
just now," whispered the kind-hearted Mrs. Belding.

"That reminds me," said the society matron--though why it should have
reminded her nobody knows! "That reminds me, my Lily is crazy to go
camping--positively crazy!"

"I know," sighed Mrs. Belding. "Laura is determined, too. And her
father approves and has overruled all _my_ objections."

"Oh, it's not that with me at all," said Mrs. Pendleton, briskly. "I'm
glad enough to have the child go. She's too much advanced for her age,
anyway. If she spends this summer at Newport, and Bar Harbor, and one
or two other places where I positively _must_ appear, I'll never be
able to get her back into school this fall.

"It ages a mother so to have a growing daughter--and one that is so
forward as Lily,"