ve her a job..."

Once again Missy's eyes wandered dreamily out over the yard...

Presently a voice was wafted out from the sideporch:

"Missy!--oh, Missy! Where are you?"

There was mother calling--bother! Missy picked up the Ladies' Home
Messenger and trudged back to bondage.

"What in the world do you mean, Missy? You could write your name all
over the parlour furniture for dust! And then those stockings--"

Missy dutifully set about her tasks. Yet, ah! it certainly is hard to
dust and darn while one's soul is seething within one, straining to fly
out on some really high enterprise of life. However one can, if one's
soul strains hard enough, dust and dream; darn and dream. Especially
if one has a helpful lilt, rhythmic to dust-cloth's stroke or needle's
swing, throbbing like a strain of music through one's head:

Cosmos--Cosmos!--Cosmos--Cosmos!

Missy was absent-eyed at the midday dinner, but no sooner was the meal
over before she feverishly attacked the darning-basket again. Her energy
may have been explained when, as soon as the stockings were done, she
asked her mother if she might go down to the Library.

Mother and Aunt Nettie from their rocking-chairs on the side-porch
watched the slim figure in its stiffly-starched white duck skirt and
shirt-waist disappear down shady Locust Avenue.

"I wonder what Missy's up to, now?" observed Aunt Nettie.

"Up to?" murmured Mrs. Merriam.

"Yes. She hardly touched her chop at dinner and she's crazy about lamb
chops. She's eaten almost nothing for days. And either shirking her
work, else going at it in a perfect frenzy!"

"Growing girls get that way sometimes," commented Missy's mother gently.
(Could Missy have heard and interpreted that tone, she might have been
less hard on grown-ups who "don't understand.") "Missy's seventeen, you
know."

"H'm!" commented Aunt Nettie, as if to say, "What's THAT to do with
it?" Somehow it seems more difficult for spinsters than for mothers to
remember those swift, free flights of madness and sweetness which, like
a troop of birds in the measurable heavens, sweep in joyous circles
across the sky of youth.

Meanwhile Missy, the big ribbon index under her sailor-brim palpitantly
askew, was progressing down Locust Avenue with a measured, accented gait
that might have struck an observer as being peculiar. The fact was that
the refrain vibrating through her soul had found its way to her feet.
She'd hardly been conscious of it at