a, "only a little weary."

"You must have a tonic," announced Miss Brent.

Patricia shuddered. She still remembered her childish sufferings
resulting from Miss Brent's interpretation and application of The
Doctor at Home. She was convinced that she had swallowed every remedy
the book contained, and been rubbed with every liniment its pages
revealed.

"No, Aunt Adelaide," she said evenly. "All I require is that you
should cease interfering in my affairs."

"How dare you! How----" Miss Brent paused wordless.

"I am prepared to accept you as an aunt," continued Patricia, outwardly
calm; but almost stifled by the pounding of her heart. "It is God's
will; but if you persist in assuming the mantle of Mrs. Grundy,
combined with the Infallibility of the Pope, then I must protest."

"Protest!" repeated Miss Brent, repeating the word as if not fully
comprehending its meaning.

"If I am able to earn my own living, then I am able to conduct my own
love affairs."

"But----" began Miss Brent.

"I am sorry to appear rude, Aunt Adelaide, but it is much better to be
frank. I am sure you mean well; but the fact of your being my sole
surviving relative places me at a disadvantage. If there were two of
you or three, you could quarrel about me, and thus preserve the
balance. Now let us talk about something else."

For once in her life Miss Brent was nonplussed. She regarded her niece
as if she had been a two-tailed giraffe, or a double-headed mastodon.
Had she been American she would have known it to be brain-storm; as it
was she decided that Patricia was sickening for some serious illness
that had produced a temperature.

In all her experience of "the Family" never once had Miss Brent been
openly defied in this way, and she had no reserves upon which to fall
back. She held personal opinion and inclination must always take
secondary place to "the Family." The individual must be sacrificed to
the group, provided the individual were not herself. Births, deaths,
marriages, christenings, funerals, weddings, were solemn functions that
must be regarded as involving not the principals themselves so much as
their relatives. Her doctrine was, although she would not have
expressed it so philosophically, that the individual is mortal; but the
family is immortal.

That anyone lived for himself or herself never seemed to occur to Miss
Brent. If their actions were acceptable to the family and at the same
time pleased the pr