"Then I wouldn't try, wife," said Marjorie's father, with his shrewd
smile. "I'd let somebody that knows."

After a while, Marjorie's mother spoke again:

"I don't know that you help me any."

"I don't know that I can; girls are mysteries--you were a mystery once
yourself. Marjorie can respond, but she will not respond, unless she has
some one to respond _to_, or some _thing_ to respond to. Towards myself I
never find but one Marjorie!"

"That means that you always give her something to respond to!"

"Well, yes, something like it," he returned in one of Marjorie's
contented tones.

"She'll have a good many heart aches before she's through, then," decided
Mrs. West, with some sharpness.

"Probably," said Marjorie's father with the shadow of a smile on his thin
lips.

III.

WHAT "DESULTORY" MEANS.

"A rose with all its sweetest leaves yet folded."

"Miss Prudence! O, Miss Prudence!"

It was summer time and Marjorie was almost fourteen years old. Her soul
was looking out of troubled eyes to-day. Just now life was all one
unanswered question.

"Marjorie! O, Marjorie!" mimicked Miss Prudence.

"I don't know what _desultory_ means," said Marjorie.

"And you don't know where to find a dictionary?"

"Mustn't I ask you questions when I can find the answer myself?" asked
Marjorie, straightforwardly.

"I think it's rather impertinent, don't you?"

"Yes," considered Marjorie, "rather."

Miss Prudence was a fair vision in Marjorie's eyes and Marjorie was a
radiant vision in Miss Prudence's eyes. The radiant vision was not
clothed in gorgeous apparel; the radiance was in the face and voice and
in every motion; the apparel was simply a stiffly starched blue muslin,
that had once belonged to Linnet and had been "let down" for Marjorie,
and her head was crowned with a broad-brimmed straw hat, around the crown
of which was tied a somewhat faded blue ribbon, also a relic of Linnet's
summer days; her linen collar was fastened with an old-fashioned pin of
her mother's; her boots were new and neatly fitting, her father had made
them especially for herself.

Her sense of the fitness of things was sometimes outraged; one of the
reasons why she longed to grow up was that she might have things of her
own; things bought for her and made for her as they always were for
Linnet. But Linnet was pretty and good and was going away to school!

The fair vision was clothed in white, a soft white, that fell in folds