d stolen her comb, and Eleanor had
been too shy to mention the fact, and had combed her hair
mermaid-wise, through her fingers.

"This morning," Beulah began brightly, "I am going to turn you loose
in the apartment, and let you do what you like. I want to get an idea
of the things you do like, you know. You can sew, or read, or drum on
the piano, or talk to me, anything that pleases you most. I want you
to be happy, that's all, and to enjoy yourself in your own way."

"Give the child absolute freedom in which to demonstrate the worth and
value of its ego,"--that was what she was doing, "keeping it carefully
under observation while you determine the individual trend along which
to guide its development."

The little girl looked about her helplessly. The room was very large
and bright. The walls were white, and so was the woodwork, the mantle,
and some of the furniture. Gay figured curtains hung at the windows,
and there were little stools, and chairs, and even trays with glass
over them, covered with the same bright colored material. Eleanor had
never seen a room anything like it. There was no center-table, no
crayon portraits of different members of the family, no easels, or
scarves thrown over the corners of the pictures. There were not many
pictures, and those that there were didn't seem to Eleanor like
pictures at all, they were all so blurry and smudgy,--excepting one of
a beautiful lady. She would have liked to have asked the name of that
lady,--but her Aunt Beulah's eyes were upon her. She slipped down from
her chair and walked across the room to the window.

"Well, dear, what would make this the happiest day you can think of?"
Beulah asked, in the tone she was given to use when she asked Gertrude
and Margaret and Jimmie--but not often Peter--what they expected to do
with their lives.

Eleanor turned a desperate face from the window, from the row of bland
elegant apartment buildings she had been contemplating with unseeing
eyes.

"Do I have to?" she asked Beulah piteously.

"Have to what?"

"Have to amuse myself in my own way? I don't know what you want me to
do. I don't know what you think that I ought to do."

A strong-minded and spoiled younger daughter of a widowed
mother--whose chief anxiety had been to anticipate the wants of her
children before they were expressed--with an independent income, and a
beloved and admiring circle of intimate friends, is not likely to be
imaginatively equipped to exp