urely, surely the Lady Bountiful game is the
dullest! I _won't_ be bored with it!"

She went toward the house, her smiling eyes on the grass. "But, of
course, if I could not get on without the young man, I should put up with
any conditions. But I can get on without him perfectly! I don't want to
marry him. But I do--I _do_ want to be friends!"

"Lydia! Mother says you'll be late if you don't get ready," said a voice
from the porch.

"Why, I am ready! I have only to put on my hat."

"Mother thought you'd change."

"Then mother was quite wrong. My best cotton frock is good enough for any
young man!" laughed Lydia.

Susan descended the garden steps. She was a much thinner and dimmer
version of her sister. One seemed to see her pale cheeks, her dark eyes
and hair, her small mouth, through mist, like a Whistler portrait. She
moved very quietly, and her voice was low, and a little dragging. The
young vicar of a neighbouring hamlet in the fells, who admired her
greatly, thought of her as playing "melancholy"--in the contemplative
Miltonic sense--to Lydia's "mirth." She was a mystery to him; a mystery
he would have liked to unravel. But she was also a mystery to her family.
She shut herself up a good deal with her books; she had written two
tragedies in blank verse; and she held feminist views, vague yet fierce.
She was apparently indifferent to men, much more so than Lydia, who
frankly preferred their society to that of her own sex; but Lydia noticed
that if the vicar, Mr. Franklin, did not call for a week Susan would
ingeniously invent some device or other for peremptorily inducing him to
do so. It was understood in the family, that while Lydia enjoyed life,
Susan only endured it. All the same she was a good deal spoilt. She
breakfasted in bed, which Mrs. Penfold never thought of doing; Lydia
mended her stockings, and renewed her strings and buttons; while Mrs.
Penfold spent twice the time and money on Susan's wardrobe that she did
on Lydia's. There was no reason whatever for any of these indulgences;
but when three women live together, one of them has only to sit still, to
make the others her slaves. Mrs. Penfold found her reward in the belief
that Susan was a genius and would some day astonish the world; Lydia had
no such illusion; and yet it would have given her a shock to see Susan
mending her own stockings.

Susan approached her now languidly, her hand to her brow. Lydia looked at
her severely.

"I suppose you