erably about sixteen, and to be a sort
of animated flowers and make home bright and be given things. He was
irritated that they would not remain at this, and still more irritated
that they failed to suppress altogether their natural interest in young
men. The tandems would be steered by weird and devious routes to evade
the bare chance of his bloodshot eye. My aunt seemed to have no ideas
whatever about what was likely to happen to her children. She had indeed
no ideas about anything; she took her husband and the days as they came.

I can see now the pathetic difficulty of my cousins' position in life;
the absence of any guidance or instruction or provision for their
development. They supplemented the silences of home by the conversation
of schoolfellows and the suggestions of popular fiction. They had to
make what they could out of life with such hints as these. The church
was far too modest to offer them any advice. It was obtruded upon my
mind upon my first visit that they were both carrying on correspondences
and having little furtive passings and seeings and meetings with the
mysterious owners of certain initials, S. and L. K., and, if I remember
rightly, "the R. N." brothers and cousins, I suppose, of their friends.
The same thing was going on, with a certain intensification, at my next
visit, excepting only that the initials were different. But when I
came again their methods were maturer or I was no longer a negligible
quantity, and the notes and the initials were no longer flaunted quite
so openly in my face.

My cousins had worked it out from the indications of their universe that
the end of life is to have a "good time." They used the phrase. That
and the drives in dog-carts were only the first of endless points of
resemblance between them and the commoner sort of American girl. When
some years ago I paid my first and only visit to America I seemed to
recover my cousins' atmosphere as soon as I entered the train at Euston.
There were three girls in my compartment supplied with huge decorated
cases of sweets, and being seen off by a company of friends, noisily
arch and eager about the "steamer letters" they would get at Liverpool;
they were the very soul-sisters of my cousins. The chief elements of a
good time, as my cousins judged it, as these countless thousands of rich
young women judge it, are a petty eventfulness, laughter, and to feel
that you are looking well and attracting attention. Shopping is one of