n to the volumes telling of real people and real achievements.
Biographies, journals, lives, and letters of women who had been, as the
Colonel said, an honor to their sex and the most interesting of their
generation. She wished that she dared ask him to choose the first book
for her, but she hadn't the courage to venture that far. So she chose at
random.

"Lives of Famous Women" was the volume that happened to attract her
first, a collection of short sketches. She took it from the shelf and
glanced through it, scanning a page here and there, for she was a rapid
reader. Then, finding that it bade fair to be entertaining, down she
dropped on the rug, and began at the preface. Lunch stopped her for
awhile, but, thoroughly interested, she carried the book up to her room
and immediately began to read again.

When she went down to the porch before dinner that evening, she did not
say to herself in so many words that maybe the Colonel would notice what
she was reading, but it was with the hope that he would that she carried
the book with her. He did notice, and commended her for it, but threw
her into a flutter of confusion by asking her what similarity she had
noticed in the lives of those women she was reading about.

It mortified her to be obliged to confess that she had not discovered
any, and she thought, as she nervously fingered the pages and looked
down at her toes, "That's what I got for trying to appear smarter than I
really am."

"This is what I meant," he began, in his didactic way. "Each of them
made a specialty of some one thing, and devoted all her energies to
accomplishing that purpose, whether it was the establishing of a salon,
the discovery of a star, or the founding of a college. They hit the
bull's-eye, because they aimed at no other spot on the target. I have no
patience with this modern way of a girl's taking up a dozen fads at a
time. It makes her a jack-at-all-trades and a master of none."

The Colonel was growing eloquent on one of his favorite topics now, and
presently Mary found him giving her the very guidance she had longed
for. He was helping her to a choice. By the time dinner was announced,
he had awakened two ambitions within her, although he was not conscious
of the fact himself. One was to study the strange insect life of the
desert, in which she was already deeply interested, to unlock its
treasures, unearth its secrets, and add to the knowledge the world had
already amassed, until she