rlwood, one of the older girls, who is a great favorite with
Aunt Patsey--but it is no use! She is a self-contained woman, never ill
at ease, and who puts you, and at once, at rights with yourself. She is
a most beautiful and discreet talker! She would rather die, burn at the
stake, suffer on the rack, than tell even the suspicion of a _family
secret_! Aunt Patsey is always talking her up to me, wishing that
I would be only a little bit like her anyhow. So the other night, at
a party, I took special care to notice the attractive Lena. She is so
graceful; quiet grace, ma calls it. She leaned against a heavy, carved
chimney-piece, with dark-red plush hangings, and she looked for all the
world just like a tall, white flower, slender, beautiful! She was slowly
picking to pieces, leaf by leaf, a pale-pink rose, which she had stolen
away from somewhere about her willowy, white throat. And while she was
doing all this--and it took quite a while, too--she looked full in the
face of the man by her side, that rather good-looking, stuck-up Calburt
Young, _and said nothing_--absolutely not a word! She did this long
enough to make me almost lose my breath. I could not do a thing like
that; it would give me nervous prostration sure! Yet, I know it is
very effective! It was just like some picture you read about, and it
was beautiful, striking, down to the smallest detail. But situations
effective, and details pleasing, are not in my line, and they are
just as much a mystery as improper fractions used to be when I was a
schoolgirl. I hated my school! It was called a "Young Ladies' Seminary."
It was a fashionable, intellectual hot-house, where premature, fleeting
blooms were cultivated regardless of any future consequence. But I
was a barren bush! I never fashion-flowered into a profusion of showy
blossoms. Aunt Patsey said that I did not reap the harvest of my golden
opportunities; but pa, he growled and grumbled a good deal when the
bills came pouring in, but paid them, and roundly swore that he was glad
he had no more fool-daughters to finish off in a fashionable seminary.

I have a keen sense of the ridiculous, and it gets me in trouble all the
time. I don't mean any harm; but I can't help telling a good thing when
I hear it or see it myself. Now that _same_ Calburt Young can't
bear me; he hates me in good fashion because I made fun of his doleful
air, and said that he had the looks and the manners of a man who had, in
a desperate mo