colds this winter and spring," pursued Jennings.
"Those things are dangerous until the voice has its full growth. She
should have two months' complete rest."

Jennings was going away for a two months' vacation. He was giving this
advice to all his pupils.

"You're right," said Baird. "Did you hear, Mildred?"

"But I hate to stop work," objected Mildred. "I want to be doing
something. I'm very impatient of this long wait."

And honest she was in this protest. She had no idea of the state of
her own mind. She fancied she was still as eager as ever for the
career, as intensely interested as ever in her work. She did not dream
of the real meaning of her content with her voice as it was, of her
lack of uneasiness over the appalling fact that such voice as she had
was unreliable, came and went for no apparent reason.

"Absolute rest for two months," declared Jennings grimly. "Not a note
until I return in August."

Mildred gave a resigned sigh.

There is much inveighing against hypocrisy, a vice unsightly rather
than desperately wicked. And in the excitement about it its dangerous,
even deadly near kinsman, self-deception, escapes unassailed. Seven
cardinal sins; but what of the eighth?--the parent of all the others,
the one beside which the children seem almost white?

During the first few weeks Mildred had been careful about spending
money. Economy she did not understand; how could she, when she had
never had a lesson in it or a valuable hint about it? So economy was
impossible. The only way in which such people can keep order in their
finances is by not spending any money at all. Mildred drew nothing,
spent nothing. This, so long as she gave her whole mind to her work.
But after the first great cold, so depressing, so subtly undermining,
she began to go about, to think of, to need and to buy clothes, to
spend money in a dozen necessary ways. After all, she was simply
borrowing the money. Presently, she would be making a career, would be
earning large sums. She would pay back everything, with interest.
Stanley meant for her to use the money. Really, she ought to use it.
How would her career be helped by her going about looking a dowd and a
frump? She had always been used to the comforts of life. If she
deprived herself of them, she would surely get into a frame of mind
where her work would suffer. No, she must lead the normal life of a
woman of her class. To work all the time--why, as Jennin