osophy, "which is not founded
upon a carefully selected trousseau."

"If his love for me depends on clothes, I don't want it," replied Laura
in an indignant voice.

Mrs. Payne shook her false gray curls, until the little wire hairpins
which held them in place slipped out and dropped into her lap.

"It might very well depend upon something more difficult to procure,"
she retorted with reason. Then in a last effort to arouse Laura into the
pride of possession, she brought out her multitude of boxes and
unfolded her treasures of old lace.

At the time Laura looked on with listless inattention, but two days
later she returned in a change of mood which put to blush the worldly
materialism of Mrs. Payne.

"Aunt Rosa, you're right," she said, "I haven't paid half enough
attention to my clothes. I believe, after all, that clothes are among
the most important things in life."

"I regard it as a merciful providence that you have come to your senses
in time," observed the old lady, with a sincerity which survived even
the extravagance into which her niece immediately plunged--for, after
looking carelessly over the contents of the large white boxes, Laura
turned away as if disappointed, and demanded in her next breath a sable
coat.

"Arnold admired a woman in a sable coat yesterday," she said, with a
gravity which impressed Mrs. Payne as almost solemn.

But her reaction into the vanities of the world was as short lived as
her former disdain of them; and by the time the sable coat arrived she
had almost begun to regret that she had ever asked for it. Since the
selection of it she had heard Kemper quite as carelessly express
approval of an ermine wrap, and her heart had suddenly sickened over the
fruitlessness of her ambition. She was still trying on the coat under
Mrs. Payne's eyes, when Gerty, coming in, as she announced, to deliver a
message, paused in the centre of the room as if petrified into an
attitude of admiration.

"My dear, you're so gorgeous that you look like nothing short of a
tragic actress. Well, you ought to be a happy woman."

"If clothes can make me happy, I suppose I shall be," rejoined Laura.
"Aunt Rosa has spared neither her own strength nor Uncle Horace's
money."

"That's because I love you better than my ease and Horace loves you
better than his foundling hospital," replied Mrs. Payne.

Standing before the long mirror, Laura looked with a frown at the sable
coat, which gave her, as Gerty had s