and their wonderful successes and triumphs, I'm the
meanest sinner that crawls.

"It's funny to see how the old folk bear themselves toward her. Aunt
Rachel regards her as a sort of an artist, and is clearly afraid that she
will break out into madness in spots somewhere. Aunt Anna disapproves of
her hair, which is brushed up like a man's, and of her skirt, which
'would be no worse if it were less like a pair of breeches,' for she has
brought her 'bike.' She talks on dangerous subjects also, and nobody did
such things in auntie's young days. Then she addresses the old girlies as
I do, and calls grandfather 'G-rand-dad,' and like the witch of Endor
generally, is possessed of a familiar spirit. Of course I give her
various warning looks from time to time lest the fat should be in the
fire, but she's a woman, bless her! and it's as true as ever it was that
a woman can keep the secret she doesn't know.

"Yes, the ideal of womanhood has changed since the old aunties were
young; but when I listen to Rosa and then look over at Rachel with her
black ringlets, and at Anna with her old-fashioned 'front,' I shudder and
ask myself, 'Why do I struggle?' What is the reward if one gives up the
fascination of life and the world? There is no reward. Nothing but
solitary old-maidism, unless two of you happen to be sisters, for who
else will join her shame to yours? Dreams, dreams, only dreams of the
dearest thing that ever comes into a woman's arms--and then you awake and
there is no one there. A dame's school, when the old father is gone, but
no children of your own to love you, nobody to think of you, scraping a
little here, pinching a little there, growing older and smaller year by
year, looking yellow and craned like an apple that has been kept on the
top shelf too long, and then--the end!

"Oh, but I'm trying so hard, so very hard, to be 'true to the higher self
in me,' because somebody says I must. What do you think I did last week?
In my character of Lady Bountiful I gave an old folks' supper in the soup
kitchen, understood to be in honour of my return. Roast beef and plum
duff, not to speak of pipes and 'baccy, and forty old people of both
sexes sitting down to 'the do.' After supper there was a concert, when
Chaise (the fat old thief!) overflowed the 'elber' chair, and alluded to
me as 'our beautiful donor,' and lured me into singing Mylecharaine, and
leading the company, when we closed with the doxology.

"But 'it was not my