how; I think the world is a pretty pleasant place to live in,
and there's lots of satisfaction to be had; and Agatha and Florence
take after me; they are nice, good-natured, contented girls;
managing their allowances,--that I wish were more,--trimming their
own bonnets, and enjoying themselves with their friends,
girl-fashion."

Which was true. Agatha and Florence were neither fretful nor
dissatisfied; they were never disrespectful, perhaps because Mrs.
Ledwith demanded less of deferential observance than of a kind of
jolly companionship from her daughters; a go-and-come easiness in
and out of what they called their home, but which was rather the
trimming-up and outfitting place,--a sort of Holmes' Hole,--where
they put in spring and fall, for a thorough overhaul and rig; and at
other times, in intervals or emergencies, between their various and
continual social trips and cruises. They were hardly ever
all-togetherish, as Desire had said, if they ever were, it was over
house cleaning and millinery; when the ordering was complete,--when
the wardrobes were finished,--then the world was let in, or they let
themselves out, and--"looked."

"Desire is different," said Mrs. Ledwith. "She's like Grant's
father, and her Aunt Desire,--pudgicky and queer."

"Well, mamma," said the child, once, driven to desperate logic for
defense, "I don't see how it can be helped. If you _will_ marry into
the Ledwith family, you can't expect to have your children all
Shieres!"

Which, again, was very true. Laura laughed at the clever sharpness
of it, and was more than half proud of her bold chick-of-prey, after
all.

Yet Desire remembered that her Aunt Frances was a Shiere, also; and
she thought there might easily be two sides to the same family; why
not, since there were two sides still further back, always? There
was Uncle Titus; who knew but it was the Oldways streak in him after
all?

Desire took refuge, more and more, with Miss Craydocke, and Rachel
Froke, and the Ripwinkleys; she even went to Luclarion with
questions, to get her quaint notions of things; and she had ventured
into Uncle Titus's study, and taken down volumes of Swedenborg to
pry into, while he looked at her with long keen regards over his
spectacles, and she did not know that she was watched.

"That young girl, Desire, is restless, Titus," Rachel Froke said to
him one day. "She is feeling after something; she wants something
real to do; and it appears likely to me