ready chose her mother's hats, and
tried to put order in her wardrobe) was the recognized head of the
state. At twelve she knew lots of things which her mother had never
thoroughly learned, and Susy, her temporary mother, had never even
guessed at: she spoke with authority on all vital subjects, from
castor-oil to flannel under-clothes, from the fair sharing of stamps
or marbles to the number of helpings of rice-pudding or jam which each
child was entitled to.

There was hardly any appeal from her verdict; yet each of her subjects
revolved in his or her own orbit of independence, according to laws
which Junie acknowledged and respected; and the interpreting of this
mysterious charter of rights and privileges had not been without
difficulty for Susy.

Besides this, there were material difficulties to deal with. The six of
them, and the breathless bonne who cooked and slaved for them all, had
but a slim budget to live on; and, as Junie remarked, you'd have thought
the boys ate their shoes, the way they vanished. They ate, certainly, a
great deal else, and mostly of a nourishing and expensive kind. They
had definite views about the amount and quality of their food, and were
capable of concerted rebellion when Susy's catering fell beneath their
standard. All this made her life a hurried and harassing business, but
never--what she had most feared it would be a dull or depressing one.

It was not, she owned to herself, that the society of the Fulmer
children had roused in her any abstract passion for the human young. She
knew--had known since Nick's first kiss--how she would love any child of
his and hers; and she had cherished poor little Clarissa Vanderlyn with
a shrinking and wistful solicitude. But in these rough young Fulmers she
took a positive delight, and for reasons that were increasingly clear to
her. It was because, in the first place, they were all intelligent; and
because their intelligence had been fed only on things worth caring for.
However inadequate Grace Fulmer's bringing-up of her increasing tribe
had been, they had heard in her company nothing trivial or dull: good
music, good books and good talk had been their daily food, and if at
times they stamped and roared and crashed about like children unblessed
by such privileges, at others they shone with the light of poetry and
spoke with the voice of wisdom.

That had been Susy's discovery: for the first time she was among
awakening minds which had been wa