n Barrington, Massachusetts. For a year she
temporised, procrastinated, loth to leave the old home, loth to leave
the grave in the cemetery back of the Methodist-Episcopal chapel. Twice
during this time she visited Page, and each time the great grey city
threw the spell of its fascination about her. Each time she returned to
Barrington the town dwindled in her estimation. It was picturesque, but
lamentably narrow. The life was barren, the "New England spirit"
prevailed in all its severity; and this spirit seemed to her a
veritable cult, a sort of religion, wherein the Old Maid was the
priestess, the Spinster the officiating devotee, the thing worshipped
the Great Unbeautiful, and the ritual unremitting, unrelenting
Housework. She detested it.

That she was an Episcopalian, and preferred to read her prayers rather
than to listen to those written and memorised by the Presbyterian
minister, seemed to be regarded as a relic of heathenish rites--a thing
almost cannibalistic. When she elected to engage a woman and a "hired
man" to manage her house, she felt the disapprobation of the entire
village, as if she had sunk into some decadent and enervating
Lower-Empire degeneracy.

The crisis came when Laura travelled alone to Boston to hear Modjeska
in "Marie Stuart" and "Macbeth," and upon returning full of enthusiasm,
allowed it to be understood that she had a half-formed desire of
emulating such an example. A group of lady-deaconesses, headed by the
Presbyterian minister, called upon her, with some intention of
reasoning and labouring with her.

They got no farther than the statement of the cause of this visit. The
spirit and temper of the South, that she had from her mother, flamed up
in Laura at last, and the members of the "committee," before they were
well aware, came to themselves in the street outside the front gate,
dazed and bewildered, staring at each other, all confounded and stunned
by the violence of an outbreak of long-repressed emotion and
long-restrained anger, that like an actual physical force had swept
them out of the house.

At the same moment Laura, thrown across her bed, wept with a vehemence
that shook her from head to foot. But she had not the least compunction
for what she had said, and before the month was out had said good-by to
Barrington forever, and was on her way to Chicago, henceforth to be her
home.

A house was bought on the North Side, and it was arranged that Aunt
Wess' should live with