nd
everywhere one went one fell over an open trunk or a barrell containing
Silver or Linen.

Mother went around with her lips moving as if in prayer, but she was
realy repeating lists, such as sowing basket, table candles, headache
tablets, black silk stockings and tennis rackets.

Sis got some lovely Clothes, mostly imported, but they had a woman come
in and sow for me. Hannah and she used to interupt my most precious
Moments at my desk by running a tape measure around me, or pinning a
paper pattern to me. The sowing woman always had her mouth full of Pins,
and once, owing to my remarking that I wished I had been illagitimate,
so I could go away and live my own life, she swallowed one. It caused a
grate deal of excitement, with Hannah blaming me and giving her vinigar
to swallow to soften the pin. Well, it turned out all right, for she
kept on living, but she pretended to have sharp pains all over her here
and there, and if the pin had been as lively as a tadpole and wriggled
from spot to spot, it could not have hurt in so many Places.

Of course they blamed me, and I shut myself up more and more in my
Sanctuery. There I lived with the creatures of my dreams, and forgot for
a while that I was only a Sub-Deb, and that Leila's last year's tennis
clothes were being fixed over for me.

But how true what dear Shakspeare says:

dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain.
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy.

I loved my dreams, but alas, they were not enough. After a tortured
hour or two at my desk, living in myself the agonies of my characters,
suffering the pangs of the wife with two husbands and both living,
struggling in the water with the children, fruit of the first union,
dying with number two and blowing my last Bubbles heavenward--after all
these emotions, I was done out.

Jane came in one day and found me prostrate on my couch, with a light of
sufering in my eyes.

"Dearest!" cried Jane, and gliding to my side, fell on her knees.

"Jane!"

"What is it? You are ill?"

I could hardly more than whisper. In a low tone I said:

"He is dead."

"Dearest!"

"Drowned!"

At first she thought I meant a member of my Familey. But when she
understood she looked serious.

"You are too intence, Bab," she said solemly. "You suffer too much. You
are wearing yourself out."

"There is no other way," I replied in broken tones.

Jane went to the Mirror and looked at herself.