instead of the other."

"Indeed we do!" exclaimed Ernest. "It's getting jolly interesting!"

"In some respects, no doubt we have advanced," observed his mother, "but
I confess I don't understand all your modern notions. Everybody seems to
be getting discontented. The poor want to be rich, and the rich want to
be millionaires; men want to do their master's work, and women want to
do men's; everything is topsy-turvy!"

"The question is: What constitutes being right side up?" said Ernest.
"One can't exactly say what is topsy-turvy till one knows _that_."

"When I was young we thought we _did_ know," said Mrs. Fullerton,
"but no doubt we are old-fashioned."

When luncheon was over, Mr. Fullerton went to the garden with his
family, according to a time-honoured custom. His love of flowers
sometimes made Hadria wonder whether her father also had been born with
certain instincts, which the accidents of life had stifled or failed to
develop. Terrible was the tyranny of circumstance! What had Emerson been
dreaming of?

Mr. Fullerton, with a rose-bud in his button-hole, went off with the
boys for a farming walk. Mrs. Fullerton returned to the house, and the
sisters were left pacing together in the sheltered old garden, between
two rows of gorgeous autumn flowers.

Hadria felt sick with dread of the coming interview.

Algitha was buoyed up, for the moment, by a strong conviction that she
was in the right.

"It can't be fair even for parents to order one's whole life according
to their pleasure," she said. "Other girls submit, I know----"

"And so the world is full of abortive, ambiguous beings, fit for
nothing. The average woman always seem to me to be _muffled_----or
morbid."

"That's what _I_ should become if I pottered about here much longer,"
said Algitha--"morbid; and if there is one thing on the face of the
earth that I loathe, it is morbidness."

Both sisters were instinctively trying to buttress up Algitha's courage,
by strengthening her position with additional arguments.

"Is it fair," Hadria asked, "to summon children into the world, and then
run up bills against them for future payment? Why should one not see the
bearings of the matter?"

"In theory one can see them clearly enough; but it is poor comfort when
it comes to practice."

"Oh, seeing the bearings of things is _always_ poor comfort!" exclaimed
the younger sister, with sudden vehemence. "Upon my word, I think it is
better, after all, to absor