ast
in putting her bureau drawers to rights, scattering sachet powders in
them, then leaving them open so as to perfume the room. At last she
came into the front "upstairs sitting-room," a heap of gloves,
stockings, collarettes--the odds and ends of a wildly disordered
wardrobe--in her lap. She tumbled all these upon the hearth rug, and
sat down upon the floor to sort them carefully. At her little desk near
by, Page, in a blue and white shirt waist and golf skirt, her slim
little ankles demurely crossed, a cone of foolscap over her forearm to
guard against ink spots, was writing in her journal. This was an
interminable affair, voluminous, complex, that the young girl had kept
ever since she was fifteen. She wrote in it--she hardly knew what--the
small doings of the previous day, her comings and goings, accounts of
dances, estimates of new acquaintances. But besides this she filled
page after page with "impressions," "outpourings," queer little
speculations about her soul, quotations from poets, solemn criticisms
of new novels, or as often as not mere purposeless meanderings of
words, exclamatory, rhapsodic--involved lucubrations quite meaningless
and futile, but which at times she re-read with vague thrills of
emotion and mystery.

On this occasion Page wrote rapidly and steadily for a few moments
after Laura's entrance into the room. Then she paused, her eyes growing
wide and thoughtful. She wrote another line and paused again. Seated on
the floor, her hands full of gloves, Laura was murmuring to herself.

"Those are good ... and those, and the black suedes make eight.... And
if I could only find the mate to this white one.... Ah, here it is.
That makes nine, nine pair."

She put the gloves aside, and turning to the stockings drew one of the
silk ones over her arm, and spread out her fingers in the foot.

"Oh, dear," she whispered, "there's a thread started, and now it will
simply run the whole length...."

Page's scratching paused again.

"Laura," she asked dreamily, "Laura, how do you spell 'abysmal'?"

"With a y, honey," answered Laura, careful not to smile.

"Oh, Laura," asked Page, "do you ever get very, very sad without
knowing why?"

"No, indeed," answered her sister, as she peeled the stocking from her
arm. "When I'm sad I know just the reason, you may be sure."

Page sighed again.

"Oh, I don't know," she murmured indefinitely. "I lie awake at night
sometimes and wish I were dead."

"You mustn'