ic.

The friendships of young girls prefigure the closer relations which will
one day come in and dissolve their earlier intimacies. The dependence of
two young friends may be mutual, but one will always lean more heavily
than the other; the masculine and feminine elements will be as sure to
assert themselves as if the friends were of different sexes.

On all common occasions Euthymia looked up to her friend as her
superior. She fully appreciated all her varied gifts and knowledge, and
deferred to her opinion in every-day matters, not exactly as an oracle,
but as wiser than herself or any of her other companions. It was a
different thing, however, when the graver questions of life came up.
Lurida was full of suggestions, plans, projects, which were too liable
to run into whims before she knew where they were tending. She would lay
out her ideas before Euthymia so fluently and eloquently that she could
not help believing them herself, and feeling as if her friend must
accept them with an enthusiasm like her own. Then Euthymia would
take them up with her sweet, deliberate accents, and bring her calmer
judgment to bear on them.

Lurida was in an excited condition, in the midst of all her new
interests and occupations. She was constantly on the lookout for papers
to be read at the meetings of her Society,--for she made it her own in
great measure, by her zeal and enthusiasm,--and in the mean time she was
reading in various books which Dr. Butts selected for her, all bearing
on the profession to which, at least as a possibility, she was looking
forward. Privately and in a very still way, she was occupying herself
with the problem of the young stranger, the subject of some delusion,
or disease, or obliquity of unknown nature, to which the vague name of
antipathy had been attached. Euthymia kept an eye upon her, partly in
the fear that over-excitement would produce some mental injury, and
partly from anxiety lest she should compromise her womanly dignity in
her desire to get at the truth of a very puzzling question.

"How do you like the books I see you reading?" said Euthymia to Lurida,
one day, as they met at the Library.

"Better than all the novels I ever read," she answered. "I have been
reading about the nervous system, and it seems to me I have come nearer
the springs of life than ever before in all my studies. I feel just as
if I were a telegraph operator. I was sure that I had a battery in my
head, for I know my