for the most part, regarded lessons as a wholly unnecessary
adjunct to their school duties, and treated them as such. And this was
all very well indeed, so far as they were concerned. From school they
would plunge into the whirl of their debutante season, and from that
into marriage--it was all clearly mapped out for them, and the shadow
of any serious doubt as to the course of their careers never fell
across their serenely trustful indolence.

There is something peculiarly vitiating in such an atmosphere.
Pleasure was regarded not merely as an embroidery on the sober fustian
of life, but as the very warp and woof of it; where the most sober
consideration was that of winning popularity and the opportunity of
social advantages, where the clothes to be bought and the parties to be
given during the holidays were already the subject of endless absorbing
discussions.

The effect of all this on each of the Prescotts was diametrically
opposed. Alma had adapted herself to it as easily as to a new cloak.
Not having any stubborn notions of her own, she was as malleable to
such an environment as a piece of modelling clay in warm water.
Pretty, good-humored, easily led, she swam into a rather meaningless
popularity inside of four days. This Nancy was glad of, but her
satisfaction was not unmixed. She saw Alma gradually undergoing a
change that threatened to damage her own steadying influence over her
sister, and to divide their sympathies. Alma was only too ready, and
too well suited temperamentally, to lose sight of the difference
between her own circumstances, and those of the girls with whom she was
now associated. Indeed the very fact that she could do so, while Nancy
could not, lay at the root of the problem that had begun to worry
Nancy. Aside from minor changes in Alma, such as, for instance, a new
little affectedness of manner, unconsciously borrowed from Mildred
Lloyd, and her use of Mildred's particular slang phrases, Nancy had
noticed in her sister at times a tinge of impatience, and a little air
of superiority, with which Alma unwillingly listened to her when she
tried to talk to her seriously. Nancy began to feel, unhappily, that
Alma was coming to resent her efforts to guide her and advise her in
regard to various small matters, and worst of all, that Alma was
privately beginning to look upon her as rather unnecessarily serious,
and even old-maidish.

It was impossible for Nancy to lose the feeling that sh