region of the temples,
made one think that in a more favorable soil she might have blossomed.
She was sitting by the window that looked out upon the narrow courtyard
below and on the rear house to which Aunt Martin's apartment was bound
by a double clothes-line running upon pulleys. In fact the whole
straitened landscape in view from the back windows was a vision of
ropes on pulleys. Sunday was the only day that Mrs. Martin cared to look
on this view, for on week-days it was a spectacle of sheets and
pillow-cases and the most intimate male and female garments flapping and
straddling shamelessly in the eddying wind.

Millard, while yet the older children had not returned, broached the
subject of their education. He particularly wished to put Mary, the
eldest, into a better school than the public school in her neighborhood,
or at least into a school where the associations would be better. He
proposed this to his aunt as delicately as possible.

"It's very kind of you, Charley," she said. "You want to make a fine
lady of her. But what would you do with her? Would it make her any
happier? She would want better clothes than we could give her; she would
become dependent on you, maybe; and she would be ashamed of the rest of
us."

"She could never be ashamed of you, aunt," said Millard. But he was
struck with a certain good sense and originality in his aunt which kept
her from accepting anything for good merely because it was commonly so
taken. What service, indeed, would it be to Mary to declass her? Of what
advantage to a poor girl to separate her from her surroundings unless
you can secure to her a life certainly better?

"It would be well," he said after a while, "if Mary could prepare
herself for some occupation by which she might some day get a living if
other resources fail. You wouldn't like her to have to go out to
service, or to fall below her family, Aunt Hannah?"

"No; certainly not. But there's the trouble. Her father is like many
other men from the country; he can't bear the idea of Mary's earning her
own living. He says he expects to support his own girls. And you know
Henry won't have her educated at your expense. He's very proud. But if
she could somehow get into a school better than the public schools in
this part of the city, a school where she would get better teaching and
meet a better class of children, I would like it, provided she did not
get a notion of being a fine lady. There is nothing worse th