heir troubles. I don't like that."

But, notwithstanding the child's imaginative gift, she was intensely
practical, in a quick-witted way that often astonished those about her.
She had an eager desire to learn domestic arts, and her peculiar
conscientiousness in the doing of whatever she undertook to do, usually
resulted in a skill superior to that of her teachers.

She loved to haunt the kitchen, where her courtesy won even the
cantankerous cook for a friend, and from her the girl learned so much of
her art that the cook could teach her no more. In the laundry the
good-natured Irish woman who presided over that department of household
economy gave her always so warm a welcome that the child came to think
of the faithful woman as one of her choicest friends. Working with her
over a little ironing board, Barbara quickly became expert in all the
finer and more delicate operation of her art, or as the laundress
herself said:

"Shure, the blissed choild puts the raal Oirish accint into the doin' up
of a pretty frock."

When she grew a little older, Barbara's French nursery governess left
her, and from that hour, almost without knowing it, the child took her
education largely into her own hands, and her aunt stood too much in awe
of her almost preternatural resoluteness, to interfere in any serious
way. She provided masters for the child, but it was the girl herself and
not the masters who decided what she should learn.

In that early time it was not generally thought necessary, or even
desirable, to send girls away from home to study in colleges in company
with boys--to learn Latin, Greek, mathematics, and basketball--to read
the indecencies of classic literature--and to mould themselves into an
unlovely similitude to men. But there were frivolities in the education
of women then which were almost as conspicuous as are the masculinities
that have since taken their place.

In Barbara's case neither of these influences was felt. Without quite
knowing what her own thought was, the girl early made up her mind that
she would learn thoroughly all things that a woman must practice in
life, that she would make herself fit to do a woman's part in the world
without any pretense whatever.

She was set at one time to learn the piano, as in that day every girl
was, to the saddening of human existence and the torturing of human
nerves. After taking a few lessons Barbara was shrewd enough to discover
that she had no musical gifts