ness."

The argument was plausible, convincing. Any listener who had been on
the point of accusing Persis of extravagance, must have humbly
acknowledged his mistake and begged her pardon. But Persis had a
harder task than to convince an outsider that she needed an addition to
her wardrobe. She was striving, and without success, to alter her own
uneasy conviction that the prospective visit of Justin Ware was
responsible for her novel and engrossing interest in her personal
appearance.

Persis, studying her reflection in the mirror, directed the point of
the scissors toward her throat as if deliberating suicide. "I wonder,"
she mused, "how 'twould look to have it turn away at the neck in a V.
'Tisn't as if I was sixty."

The scissors, obedient to the suggestion, snipped a cautious line
directly beneath Persis' chin. The cambric was folded back to give the
desired V-effect, and Persis' countenance assumed an expression of
complacence altogether justifiable. Then at this most inopportune
moment, Joel entered.

"Persis, have you seen my bottle of Rand's Remedy?" Joel had reached
the stage, perhaps the most dangerous in his unceasing round, when he
was ready to accept implicitly the claims made for every patent
panacea. He dosed himself without mercy. He had a different pill for
every hour, pills for promoting digestion, for regulating the heart
action, for producing flesh. He swallowed weird powders, before and
after meals. He took a wine-glass of a sticky unwholesome-looking
fluid before retiring. Every periodical that came into the house he
scanned for advertisements of proprietary remedies, and his manner
sometimes suggested a complete willingness to contract asthma or
sciatica in order to have an excuse for testing the cures so glowingly
endorsed.

The spectacle of his sister, becomingly arrayed in the lining of the
new gown, temporarily eclipsed the claims of Rand's Remedy. Joel came
to a jerky halt and stood open-mouthed.

"Dress-goods must be getting expensive." Having convinced himself that
his eyes had not deceived him, Joel relieved his feelings by heavy
sarcasm. "It's a pity you can't afford cloth enough to cover you. I
guess it's true that modesty's getting to be a lost art when a woman of
your age will flaunt around--"

The goaded Persis spoke to the point. "Seems to me I remember not so
very long back when you were taking a constitutional out on the front
lawn without much more'n a ba