dividuality.

One day Lily wore a white frock with blue ribbons, and Amelia wore one
with coral pink. It was a particular day in school; there was company,
and tea was served.

"I told you I was going to wear blue ribbons," Lily whispered to Amelia.
Amelia smiled lovingly back at her.

"Yes, I know, but I thought I would wear pink."

THE COCK OF THE WALK

DOWN the road, kicking up the dust until he marched, soldier-wise, in a
cloud of it, that rose and grimed his moist face and added to the heavy,
brown powder upon the wayside weeds and flowers, whistling a queer,
tuneless thing, which yet contained definite sequences--the whistle of
a bird rather than a boy--approached Johnny Trumbull, aged ten, small of
his age, but accounted by his mates mighty.

Johnny came of the best and oldest family in the village, but it was
in some respects an undesirable family for a boy. In it survived, as
fossils survive in ancient nooks and crannies of the earth, old traits
of race, unchanged by time and environment. Living in a house lighted
by electricity, the mental conception of it was to the Trumbulls as the
conception of candles; with telephones at hand, they unconsciously still
conceived of messages delivered with the old saying, "Ride, ride,"
etc., and relays of post-horses. They locked their doors, but still had
latch-strings in mind. Johnny's father was a physician, adopting modern
methods of surgery and prescription, yet his mind harked back to cupping
and calomel, and now and then he swerved aside from his path across the
field of the present into the future and plunged headlong, as if for
fresh air, into the traditional past, and often with brilliant results.

Johnny's mother was a college graduate. She was the president of the
woman's club. She read papers savoring of such feminine leaps ahead that
they were like gymnastics, but she walked homeward with the gait of her
great-grandmother, and inwardly regarded her husband as her lord and
master. She minced genteelly, lifting her quite fashionable skirts high
above very slender ankles, which were hereditary. Not a woman of her
race had ever gone home on thick ankles, and they had all gone home.
They had all been at home, even if abroad--at home in the truest sense.
At the club, reading her inflammatory paper, Cora Trumbull's real
self remained at home intent upon her mending, her dusting, her house
economics. It was something remarkably like her astral body which