ve very little sense at times, and no hold-outness at all
when certain things come to pass.

Elizabeth still loves Whythe. Engaged or not to some one else, she
still cares only for him. I don't want him. I wonder how it might be
managed--getting them to take in how silly they have been. I believe
I'll try and see if something can't be done. Watchful waiting may be
all right in some cases, but I never cared for waiting. Milton says
all things come to him who hustles while he waits. You get a move on,
Kitty Canary, and see what you can do!

CHAPTER XVIII

The party is over. Everybody who is anybody was at it and we had a
perfectly scrumptious time. I never saw so many good things to eat on
a hot summer night in all my life, but the heat didn't affect
appetites, and Miss Kate Norris, who lives in the Wellington Home
(memorial for a dead wife or a live conscience, I don't remember
which), ate three platefuls of supper and three helpings of ice-cream.
She is fearfully ancestral and an awful eater, and also a sour
remarker, and I stay out of her way, but that night I couldn't help
seeing the way she made food disappear. No low-born person could have
done it quicker.

It was a perfectly beautiful party. The two married daughters of Judge
and Mrs. MacLean, who live in the city and always come home for August,
were as dear and lovely as if they had never left old Twickenham Town,
and their clothes were a liberal education to the stay-at-homers. They
were well taken in by the latter, but the sensation of the evening was
the arrival and appearance of My Girls, and--oh, my granny!--I was so
excited I couldn't stand on both feet at once, and I had to get in a
corner and put my back against the wall to keep from making movement.
When they came in the room there was a little hush, and then there were
so many exclamations of surprise and admiration that I had to fan as
hard as Mr. Willie Prince to keep down the blazing red in my face which
was there from pride in the dear old darlings and not from heat. And I
saw clearer than I had ever seen before that fine things behind one
count a good deal, and ancestors of the right kind leave something to
their descendants that comes out when needed, and at that party the
desirable things came out.

They looked like pictures--Miss Susanna and Miss Araminta--for the
prevailing modes, as Miss Araminta calls them, and which she loves so
dearly and hits at but never touches,