e dear is two months old and Mamie is just beginning on
his little dress for him. He has been wearing the plainest little slips.
Mamie says Ned remarked on the fact that the baby was hardly presentable
when you girls stopped in with him to see it the other day, Nell. I
urged her to get right to work fixing him up. It is wrong for children
not to be kept as daintily as their father likes to see them."

How any woman that is as spiritually-minded as I am, and who has so much
love for the whole world in her heart, and such a deep purpose always to
offer it to her fellowmen according to their need of it, can have the
vile temper I possess I cannot see.

"And the sight that would please me better than anything else I have
even thought up to want to see," I found myself saying when I became
conscious--I hope I didn't use any of the oaths of my forefathers which
must have been tempting my refined foremothers for generations and which
I secretly admire Henrietta for indulging in on occasions of impatience
with Sallie--"would be Ned Hall left entirely alone with that squirming
baby, that looks exactly like him, when it is having a terrible spell of
colic and Ned is in the midst of a sick headache, with all the other
children cold, hungry, and cross, the cook gone to a funeral, and the
nurse in a grouch because she couldn't go and--and he knowing that Mamie
was attired in a lovely, cool muslin dress, sitting up here on the porch
with us sipping a mint julep and smoking a ten-cent cigar, resting and
getting up an appetite for supper. I want him to have about five years
of such days and then he would deserve the joys of parenthood that he
now does not appreciate."

"Oh, Mamie wouldn't smoke a cigar!" was the exclamation that showed how
much Sallie got of the motif of my eruption.

"Glorious!" exclaimed Nell, with shining eyes.

I must be careful about Nell, she is going this new gait too fast for
one so young. Women must learn to fletcherize freedom if it is not to
give them indigestion of purpose.

"Still Ned provides everything in the world he can think of to help
Mamie," said Caroline, who had come up the walk just in time to fan the
flame in me by her sweet wistfulness, with a soft judiciousness in her
voice and eyes. "And Mamie adores the children and him."

If one man is unattainable to a woman all the other creatures take on
the hue of being valuable from the reflection. Caroline is pathetic!

"It would be robbing a