uch a
horrid light! I don't seem to have but half a face, and I can't tell
which is the up-side of that! And--oh dear! I've no _time_ to get into a
fuss!" Elinor had not disdained the beauty and wonder without; but it
was, after all, necessary to be dressed, and in a given time; and a bad
light for a looking-glass is such a disastrous thing!

"I've brushed out half my crimps," she said, again; "and my ruffle is
basted in wrong side out, and altogether I'm got up _a la furieuse_!"
But she laughed before she had done scolding, catching sight of her own
exaggerated little frown in the distorting glass, that was unable, with
all its malice, to spoil the bright young face when it came to smiles
and dimples.

And then Jeannie came knocking at the door. They had spare minutes,
after all, and the mists were yet tossing in the valley when they went
down. They were growing filmy, and floating away in shining fragments up
over the shoulders of the hills, and the lake was lower and less, and
the emerging green was like the "Thousand Islands."

They waited a little there, in the wide, open door together, and looked
out upon it; and then the Haddens went round into their sister's room,
and Leslie was left alone in the rare, sweet, early air. The secret joy
came whispering at her heart again: that there was all this in the
world, and that one need not be utterly dull and mean, and dead to it;
that something in her answered to the greatness overshadowing her; that
it was possible, sometimes, and that people did reach out into a larger
life than that of self and every-day. How else did the great mountains
draw them to themselves so? But then she would not always be among the
mountains.

And so she stood, drinking in at her eyes all the shifting and melting
splendors of the marvelous scene, with her thought busy, once more, in
its own questioning. She remembered what she had said to Cousin
Delight: "It is all outside. Going, and doing, and seeing, and hearing,
and having. In myself, am I good for any more, after all? Or only--a
green fig-tree in the sunshine?"

Why, with that word, did it all flash together for her, as a connected
thing? Her talk that morning, many weeks ago, that had seemed to ramble
so from one irrelevant matter to another,--from the parable to her
fancy-traveling, the scenes and pleasures she had made for herself,
wondering if the real would ever come; to the linen-drawer, representing
her little feminine absorp