nified this time an indiscreet,
pleasure-mad child. Sissy understood, and she blushed for her sister. In
fact, she was always blushing for her sister. She considered it to be
her duty formally and officially to disavow her senior. So reprehensible
did she feel Split's conduct to be that some one must blush for it; and
as blushing was not Split's forte, Sissy did it for her.

And she really did it very well, with an assumption of chagrin that
could not fail to call attention subtly to the contrast between the
sisters. When Split failed in her lessons with a completeness, a
sensational ostentation that was shocking to Sissy, that Number 1
scholar blushed gently, and, discreetly lowering her head, became
absorbed in her work. After school, when Split was being kept in and
disciplined (a process which never failed effectually to discipline the
hardy individual who attempted it), when she wept and stormed and raged
and threw caution to the winds as only tempestuous Split could, then was
Sissy's attitude a marvel of disapproving rectitude. She had a great
deal of dignity, had Sissy, and the picture of holiness that she
presented as, with her books on her arm, she walked past the desk where
the sobbing sinner's head lay with tumbled curls and bloated face, came
as near as anything could to quench the passion of tears in which
Split's tempers culminated. On such occasions the infuriated Split was
wont, for just a moment, to conquer the half-hysterical sobs that
threatened to choke her as well as inundate the world, and make a face
at Saint Cecilia as she passed holily by. But Cecilia was a Madigan
always, as well as a saint temporarily, and her eyes were turned
prudently away just then, as though she were already studiously
pondering to-morrow's lesson.

But Sissy blushed her most perfect disapproval when she played chaperon
to her elder sister. It was a position for which she felt herself
peculiarly fitted, even without the semi-official commission she held--a
position which so conscientious a person could not regard in the light
of a sinecure.

As she danced only the more sedate dances, because of that obtrusive
tendency of the red sham to her skirt, Sissy was able to chaperon her
senior all the more effectively at Crosby Pemberton's party. Irene
danced like a thing whose vocation is motion. She was a twig in a
rain-storm, a butterfly seeking sweets, a humming-bird whose wing beat
the air with a very rhapsody of rhythm. Sh