st notions of
progress, too. I must have put the idea into their heads."

"All except Zenie," amended Miss Susie. "She's old-fashioned."

"Perhaps I'd better be coming back." She stood by the door, musing.

Miss Susie reached over for her spectacles. There was an almost
imperceptible flash in her eyes. "And be like Zenie?"

The shot missed. Mary Louise was turning over many things in her mind.
Her little plans were being threatened and by circumstances which she
had previously scorned to notice. Irritation and a restless desire to
be up and at her obstacles were prevailing over all other feelings.
For several moments she pondered, gazing through the glass half of the
sitting-room door, and then with a hurried, "I'll be back," she bolted
from the room, out toward the kitchen.

When she returned some fifteen minutes later there was a look of
settled calm on her face, and she busied herself making Miss Susie
comfortable; for she had reached a decision and could think about
other things. And the things that old Landy had told her had sobered
her while they strengthened that decision.

That night she lay on a restless pillow. The sudden change from the
rattle and bang of the city where all the little noises were swallowed
up in a general roar was hard on her ravelled nerves. She missed the
noise. She found herself painfully acute to all the little tickings
and crackings and buzzings that an open country window brings to one's
ears. There was an unpleasant smell of damp matting there in the dark
room. And the wind, as it came soughing down from the hill behind,
caught a loose end of the roof somewhere over her head and made as
though to roll it back. But it never did. Her bed was lumpy. It had
never seemed so before. And there was not enough ventilation in the
room. The two windows, placed side by side in the eaves, allowed no
circulation. People in the country did not know how to live. Now she
would knock that partition away. There was no use having a hall at
the head of the stairs, a hall that led nowhere except into one room.
She would knock that partition away and make a single big room of the
whole attic. And then the window in the hall would serve for
additional light and air for the one room. Or would it be better to
cut another window and run the partition lengthwise, thus making two
rooms of it? That might be better. Two rooms were better than one
great big barn of a room. Later on, perhaps, she would have it d