ted them of him he would learn something else that was needed. So
with what was left to his share from his father's little remnant of
property, he had two years at the Technological School, and here he
was in Boston waiting. You can see what he meant by real work, and
how deep his theories and distinctions lay. You can see that it
might be a hard thing for one young man, here or there, to take up
the world on these terms now, in this year of our Lord eighteen
hundred and sixty-nine.

Over the way Desire Ledwith was beginning again, after a pause in
which we have made our little chassee.

"I know a girl," she said, "who has got a studio. And she talks
about art, and she knows styles, and who has done what, and she runs
about to see pictures, and she copies things, and she has little
plaster legs and toes and things hanging round everywhere. She
thinks it is something great; but it's only Mig, after all.
Everything is. Florence Migs into music. And I won't Mig, if I never
do anything. I'm come here this morning to darn stockings." And she
pulled out of her big waterproof pocket a bundle of stockings and a
great white ball of darning cotton and a wooden egg.

"There is always one thing that is real," said Mrs. Ripwinkley,
gently, "and that shows the way surely to all the rest."

"I know what you mean," said Desire, "of course; but they've mixed
that all up too, like everything else, so that you don't know where
it is. Glossy Megilp has a velvet prayer-book, and she blacks her
eyelashes and goes to church. We've all been baptized, and we've
learned the Lord's Prayer, and we're all Christians. What is there
more about it? I wish, sometimes, they had let it all alone. I think
they vaccinated us with religion, Aunt Frank, for fear we should
take it the natural way."

"Thee is restless," said Rachel Froke, tying on her gray cloak. "And
to make us so is oftentimes the first thing the Lord does for us. It
was the first thing He did for the world. Then He said, 'Let there
be light!' In the meantime, thee is right; just darn thy stockings."
And Rachel went.

They had a nice morning, after that, "leaving frets alone," as Diana
said. Diana Ripwinkley was happy in things just as they were. If the
sun shone, she rejoiced in the glory; if the rain fell, it shut her
in sweetly to the heart of home, and the outside world grew fragrant
for her breathing. There was never anything in her day that she
could spare out of it, and there