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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'
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