n a mood quite the reverse of enthusiastic, I was
painfully trying to gather from my small and scattered sources of
information what the exact meaning of the phrase might be.

I had entered on the performance of my errand to Wallencamp under
circumstances not usual, perhaps, among propagandists; nevertheless, I
had been singularly free from misgivings.

A girl of nineteen years, I had a home endowed with every luxury; a
circle of family acquaintance, which, I admitted, did me great
credit; congenial companions; while as for my education, I was pleased
to call it completed. My career at boarding-schools had been of a
delightfully varied and elective nature, for I had not deigned to toil
with squalid studiousness, or even to sail with politic and inglorious
ease through the prescribed course of study at any institution. Any
misadventures necessarily following from this course my friends had
gilded over with the flattering insinuation that I was "too vivacious"
for this sort of discipline, or "too fragile" for that, though I am
bound to say that, in such cases, my "vivacity" had generally sealed my
fate before the delicacy of my constitution became too alarmingly
apparent.

I had, to be sure, a few commendable aspirations, but I had started out
fresh so many times with them only to see them meet the same end!

Though not by nature of a self-depreciatory turn of mind, I had
occasional flashes of inspiration, to the effect that, in spite of the
soft flattery of friends, I really was amounting to very little after
all. It was in a mood induced by one of these supernatural gleams that I
stood on one occasion, leaning a pair of very plump arms on the graveyard
wall, looking wistfully over into the place of tombs, and thinking how
nice it would be to have done forever with the fret and turmoil of life!
And it was at such a time, too, that I received from a school friend,
Mary Waite, the letter which was the moving cause of my mission to
Wallencamp.

Mary Waite, by the way, was one of those "prosy, ridiculous girls"--so I
had been compelled to classify her, although I was secretly troubled by
a sincere admiration of her virtues,--who had made it an absorbing
pursuit of her school-days to probe her text-books for useful
information, and was also accustomed to defer to her teachers as high
authority on matters of daily discipline. She was not in "our set." She
was poor, and studious, and obedient, yet a friendship had sprung u