them.

Louisa, meanwhile, was learning many lessons as she traveled slowly up
the road to womanhood--learning courage and self-denial, linked with
cheerfulness from mother and father, and enjoying a wholesome
comradeship in the home life with her sisters.

Anna, the oldest daughter, was much like her father. She never worried
about her soul or her shortcomings as Louisa did; she accepted life as
it came, without question, and was of a calm nature, unlike turbulent,
questioning Louisa, who had as many moods as there were hours in a day
and who found ruling her tempestuous nature the hardest piece of work
life offered her. She confesses in her diary: "My quick tongue is
always getting me into trouble, and my moodiness makes it hard to be
cheerful when I think how poor we are, how much worry it is to live,
and how many things I long to do--I never can. So every day is a
battle, and I'm so tired I don't want to live, only it's cowardly to
die till you have done something." Having made this confession to an
unresponsive page of her journal, the restless nature gave up the
desire to be a coward, and turned to achieving whatever work might
come to her hand to do, little dreaming what was before her in the
coming years. She was very fine looking, of which she evidently was
conscious, for she says in her diary:

"If I look in my glass I try to keep down vanity about my long hair,
my well-shaped head, and my good nose." Besides these good points of
which she speaks so frankly, she was tall and graceful, with a heavy
mass of glossy, chestnut-brown hair. Her complexion was clear and full
of color, and her dark-blue eyes were deep-set and very expressive.

During those years in Boston, the Alcotts spent two summers in an
uncle's roomy house, where they enjoyed such comforts as had not
before fallen to their lot, and calm Anna, sweet retiring Beth, or
Betty, as she was called, and artistic May, the youngest of the flock,
revelled in having rooms of their own, and plenty of space for their
own belongings. May was a pretty, golden-haired, blue-eyed child with
decided tastes, and an ability to get what she most wanted in life
without much effort--an ability which poor Louisa entirely lacked, for
her success always came as the result of exhausting work.

Louisa was now seventeen years old, and Anna nineteen. At that time
came the small-pox siege, and after Anna had recovered partially she
was obliged to take a rest, leaving her sm