've had a special disgust given me to superiority. I wouldn't be
superior for all the world. We had a superior specimen come among us at
Highslope last year. She's there yet, it's commonly believed; but nobody
takes the trouble to be positive of it. Reason why, she took up
immediately such a position of mental and moral altitude above our
heads, and became so sublimely unconscious of all beneath, that all
beneath wasn't going to strain its neck to look after her, much less
provide itself with telescopes. We're pretty nice people, we think, but
we're not particularly curious in astronomy. We heard great things of
her, beforehand; and we were all ready to make much of her. We asked her
to our parties. She came, with a look upon her as if some unpleasant
duty had forced her temporarily into purgatory. She shied round like a
cat in a strange garret, as if all she wanted was to get out. She
wouldn't dance; she wouldn't talk; she went home early,--to her studies,
I suppose, and her plans for next day's unmitigated usefulness. She took
it for granted we had nothing in us _but_ dance, and so, as Artemus Ward
says, 'If the American Eagle could solace itself in that way, we let it
went!' She might have done some good to us,--we needed to be done to, I
don't doubt,--but it's all over now. That light is under a bushel, and
that city's hid, so far as Highslope is concerned. And we've pretty much
made up our minds, among us, to be bad and jolly. Only sometimes I get
thinking,--that's all."

She got up, giving the string of rings a final whirl, and tossing them
into Leslie Goldthwaite's lap. "Good-by," she said, shaking down her
flounces. "It's time for me to go and assert myself at Shinar.
'_L'empire, c'est moi!_' Napoleon was great when he said that. A great
deal greater than if he'd pretended to be meek, and want nothing but the
public good!"

"What gets crowded out?" Day by day that is the great test of our life.

Just now, everything seemed likely to get crowded out with the young
folks at Outledge but dresses, characters, and rehearsals. The swivel
the earth turned on at this moment was the coming Tuesday evening and
its performance. And the central axis of that, to nearly every
individual interest, was what such particular individual was to "be."

They had asked Leslie to take the part of Zorayda in the "Three Moorish
Princesses of the Alhambra." Jeannie and Elinor were to be Zayda and
Zorahayda. As for Leslie, she liked wel