led with their own Russian violet in a
bouquet of fragrance. It was warm, but there was the life of youth in
the air; one felt the bound of the pulse of the spring, not its
lassitude of passive yielding to the forces of growth.

The yards of the village homes, or the grounds, as they were commonly
designated, were gay with the earlier flowering shrubs, almond and
bridal wreath and Japanese quince. The deep scarlet of the
quince-bushes was evident a long distance ahead, like floral torches.
Constantly tiny wings flashed in and out the field of vision with
insistences of sweet flutings. The day was at once redolent and
vociferous.

"It is a beautiful day," said Mrs. Van Dorn.

"Yes, it is beautiful," echoed Mrs. Lee, with fervor.

Her faded blue eyes, under the net-work of ingratiating wrinkles,
looked aside, from self-consciousness, out of the coach window at a
velvet lawn with a cherry-tree and a dark fir side by side, and a
Japanese quince in the foreground.

After passing the house, both ladies began pluming themselves,
carefully rubbing on their white gloves and asking each other if
their bonnets were on straight.

"Your bonnet is so pretty," said Mrs. Lee, admiringly.

"It's a bonnet I have had two years, with a little bunch of violets
and new strings," said Mrs. Van Dorn, with conscious virtue.

"It looks as if it had just come out of the store," said Mrs. Lee.
She was vainly conscious of her own headgear, which was quite new
that spring, and distinctly prettier than the other woman's. She
hoped that Mrs. Van Dorn would remark upon its beauty, but she did
not. Mrs. Van Dorn was a good woman, but she had her limitations when
it came to admiring in another something that she had not herself.

Mrs. Lee's superior bonnet had been a jarring note for her all the
way. She felt in her inmost soul, though she would have been loath to
admit the fact to herself, that a woman whom she had invited to make
calls with her at her expense had really no right to wear a finer
bonnet--that it was, to say the least, indelicate and tactless.
Therefore she remarked, rather dryly, upon the beauty of a new
pansy-bed beside the drive into which they now turned. The bed looked
like a bit of fairy carpet in royal purples and gold.

"I call that beautiful," said Mrs. Van Dorn, with a slight emphasis
on the that, as if bonnets were nothing; and Mrs. Lee appreciated her
meaning.

"Yes, it is lovely," she said, meekly, as they rolle