bed before us.

Such a dazzling idea gave me an entirely new set of fancies, and was a
pleasant book companion and bedfellow to take back to the convent.
Hallie, who was a year older and half a head taller than I, had already
begun to lengthen her dresses, and do up her hair, and I found it
humiliating to be so small that at sixteen I had still to wear mine
down my back in long curls, and my skirts above my ankles. The only
thing that comforted me was that whenever father came to see me he
always said:

"Child, how tall you are! You're almost a woman!" and though he was
the one person who seemed to think so it was quite sufficient for me.
When my graduation day came I was much excited to think how absolutely
grown-up I would appear to him in my first long frock, but when I came
to him after the exercises were over, he looked at me as if he were
sad, and said, "Child, how little you are!"

That was a dreadful disappointment to me, but when I reminded him how
he had always told me I was tall, he laughed, and said: "You were tall
for a school-girl, but you're very little to be the mistress of a
house."

That puzzled me; but on the way home, driving up through the valley, he
told me more about what he meant. He said, "Now that you have stopped
being a child you are going to be a very gay young lady; going to have
fine gowns, and dance about like a butterfly; and you're going to keep
on being my little girl; but at the same time I am afraid you will have
to be a little lady of the house, too, and take care of me, and
Abby--now that Abby's rheumatism is so bad--and go to call on the
ladies who were your mother's friends, and are going to be yours. Do
you think you are tall enough to do all that?"

I was so surprised and so happy that I hugged him right there in the
buggy, and said: "Do you really mean it?"

Father laughed, just as he does to cover up being rather serious, and
said: "You are your mother's daughter, for she was a little fair woman,
but there was never anything too big for her to manage."

I was happier than ever to hear him say that--he so seldom spoke of
mother--and the idea of a whole house to manage, and of sitting at the
foot of the table, and calling on grown-up married women seemed to me
as merry and exciting as going to parties, and having beaus.

I had not been in the city for a year, spending my last vacations at
the ranch at Menlo Park; and though I knew from what Hallie had told
me, tha