vagant and regrettable expedition of yours to the wildest
misconceptions of your place in the world and of your duties and
responsibilities. Even now, it seems to me, your present emotion is due
not so much to a real and sincere penitence for your disobedience and
folly as to a positive annoyance at our most fortunate interference--"

"Not that," said Mrs. Milton, in a low tone. "Not that."

"But WHY did she go off like this?" said Widgery. "That's what _I_ want
to know."

Jessie made an attempt to speak, but Mrs. Milton said "Hush!" and the
ringing tenor of the clergyman rode triumphantly over the meeting. "I
cannot understand this spirit of unrest that has seized upon the more
intelligent portion of the feminine community. You had a pleasant home,
a most refined and intelligent lady in the position of your mother, to
cherish and protect you--"

"If I HAD a mother," gulped Jessie, succumbing to the obvious snare of
self-pity, and sobbing.

"To cherish, protect, and advise you. And you must needs go out of it
all alone into a strange world of unknown dangers-"

"I wanted to learn," said Jessie.

"You wanted to learn. May you never have anything to UNlearn."

"AH!" from Mrs. Milton, very sadly.

"It isn't fair for all of you to argue at me at once," submitted Jessie,
irrelevantly.

"A world full of unknown dangers," resumed the clergyman. "Your proper
place was surely the natural surroundings that are part of you. You
have been unduly influenced, it is only too apparent, by a class of
literature which, with all due respect to distinguished authoress
that shall be nameless, I must call the New Woman Literature. In that
deleterious ingredient of our book boxes--"

"I don't altogether agree with you there," said Miss Mergle, throwing
her head back and regarding him firmly through her spectacles, and Mr.
Widgery coughed.

"What HAS all this to do with me?" asked Jessie, availing herself of the
interruption.

"The point is," said Mrs. Milton, on her defence, "that in my books--"

"All I want to do," said Jessie, "is to go about freely by myself. Girls
do so in America. Why not here?"

"Social conditions are entirely different in America," said Miss Mergle.
"Here we respect Class Distinctions."

"It's very unfortunate. What I want to know is, why I cannot go away for
a holiday if I want to."

"With a strange young man, socially your inferior," said Widgery, and
made her flush by his tone.

"Why not?" sh