t matter-of-fact way in the
world, and without a gleam of self-conscious heroics, whether of boasting
or of martyr-meekness or of any other device for signaling attention to
oneself. Indeed, it would not have occurred to her that she was doing
anything out of the ordinary. Nor, for that matter, would she have been;
for, in this world the unheroic are, more often than not, heroes, and the
heroic usually most unheroic. We pass heroism by to toss our silly caps
at heroics.

"There are some things, Artie, our education has been taking out of us,"
continued Del, "that I don't believe we're the better for losing. I've
been thinking of those things a good deal lately, and I've come to the
conclusion that there really is a rotten streak in what we've been
getting there in the East--you at Harvard, I at Mrs. Spenser's Select
School for Young Ladies. There are ways in which mother and father are
better educated than we."

"It does irritate me," admitted Arthur, "to find myself caring so much
about the _looks_ of things."

"Especially," said Adelaide, "when the people whose opinion we are afraid
of are so contemptibly selfish and snobbish."

"Still mother and father are narrow-minded," insisted her brother.

"Isn't everybody, about people who don't think as they do?"

"I've not the remotest objection to their having their own views," said
Arthur loftily, "so long as they don't try to enforce those views on me."

"But do they? Haven't we been let do about as we please?"

Arthur shrugged his shoulders. The discussion had led up to property
again--to whether or not his father had the right to do as he pleased
with his own. And upon that discussion he did not wish to reenter. He had
not a doubt of the justice of his own views; but, somehow, to state them
made him seem sordid and mercenary, even to himself. Being really
concerned for his mother's health, as well as about "looks," he strongly
urged the doctor to issue orders on the subject of a nurse. "If you
demand it, mother'll yield," he said.

"But I shan't, young man," replied Schulze curtly and with a conclusive
squeezing together of his homely features. "Your mother is right. She
gives your father what money can't buy and skill can't replace, what has
often raised the as-good-as-dead. Some day, maybe, you'll find out what
that is. You think you know now, but you don't." And there the matter
rested.

The large room adjoining Hiram and Ellen's bedroom was made over into