s certainly the most
unfortunate being in the universe. She became very much interested in
a deaf man that she met in her settlement work, and so as to give the
poor thing employment she appointed him Superintendent of the Working
Boys' Club. Now the working boys refuse to play with him and the
directors have had a meeting asking Laura to remove him at once. I do
think they might have endured him one season when I gave him a
twenty-dollar ear-trumpet, but some people are utterly unreasonable;
and here I am, in need of advice every moment, and Laura kept in the
city!"

"Haven't you any family?"

"Not a soul; have you?"

"No one but a cousin."

"I believe nobody nice and interesting has a family nowadays. Laura
has no one but an uncongenial stepmother, and that is the reason we
are so intimate. I am so giddy and frivolous, and Laura is so noble
and self-sacrificing that I try to form myself on her now and then,
when I'm not too busy."

"You live with her, do you?"

"Oh, no! I don't live anywhere in particular. Of course I have a house
and a lady housekeeper, but she doesn't count. I've been staying
mostly with a Mrs. Beckett, an old friend of my mother's. She is the
dearest and loveliest woman in the world and I can't bear to be away
from her."

"Why can't she join forces with you if you are so alone in the
world?"

"Because there's a son."

"Is he too young, or too old, to join forces?"

"No, he's just right, and he'd be only too glad to join forces, or
anything else that had me in it, but he mustn't, and that's the reason
Laura made me come here!" And with this she punched the sofa-pillows
rebelliously, looking more like an enraged Angora kitten than anything
else.

"It's your hour for cold spray," said Jimmy, the page-boy, peeping in
at the crack of the door.

"I'll come!" she responded unwillingly. "Now do steal in again," she
whispered, turning to me, "for I must talk to somebody, and if Laura
could see you I know she would think you safer than anybody here."

That afternoon, as I swung in my hammock in the grove below the
sanitarium, I looked up at its three stories of height and its rows
upon rows of windows, and wondered how many cases of neurasthenia
under its roof were traceable to a conflict between love and
conscience. "I begin to have an interest in that chatterbox neighbor
of mine," I thought drowsily, "and that, after vowing not to make an
acquaintance in this place. Love will be a side