ference. Even Dinky-Dunk has noticed
this. Yesterday he stood and stared after her.

"By gum," he sagely remarked, "that girl is getting a figure!" Men are
so absurd. When this same Olga was going about half uncovered he never
even noticed her. Now that she's mystified her nether limbs with a
little drapery he stands staring after her as though she were a Venus de
Milo come to life. And Olga is slowly but surely losing a little of her
Arcadian simplicity. Yesterday I caught her burning up her cowhide
boots. She is ashamed of them. And she is spending most of her money on
clothes, asking me many strange questions as to apparel and carrying off
my fashion magazines to her bedroom for secret perusal. For the first
time in her life she is using cold cream. And the end seems to justify
the means, for her skin is now like apple blossoms. Rodin, I feel sure,
would have carried that woman across America on his back, once to have
got her into his atelier!

Last week I persuaded Terry to take a try at Meredith and lent him my
green cloth copy of _Harry Richmond_. Three days ago I found the seventh
page turned down at the corner, and suspecting that this marked the
final frontier of his advance, I tied a strand of green silk thread
about the volume. It was still there this morning, though Terry daily
and stoutly maintains that he's getting on grand with that fine green
book of mine! But at noon to-day when Dinky-Dunk got back from Buckhorn
he handed Terry a parcel, and I noticed the latter glanced rather
uneasily about as he unwrapped it. This afternoon I discovered that it
held two new books in paper covers. One was _The Hidden Hand_ and the
other was called _The Terror of Tamaraska Gulch_. Terry, of late, has
been doing his reading in his own room. And Nick Carter, apparently, is
not to be so easily displaced. But a man who can make you read his books
for the third time must be a genius. If I were an author, that's the
sort of man I'd envy. And I think I'll try Percival Benson with _The
Terror of Tamaraska Gulch_ when Terry is through with it!

_Friday the Sixteenth_

We were just finishing dinner to-day, and an uncommonly good one it
seemed to me, and I was looking contentedly about my little family
circle, wondering what more life could hold for a big healthy hulk of a
woman like me, when the drone and purr of an approaching motor-car broke
through the sound of our talk. Dinky-Dunk, in fact, was laying down the
law