f countenance, more or less marked in each of the other children,
was scarcely discernible in her, and she looked enough like other
Moonstone girls to be thought pretty. Anna's nature was conventional, like
her face. Her position as the minister's eldest daughter was important
to her, and she tried to live up to it. She read sentimental religious
story-books and emulated the spiritual struggles and magnanimous
behavior of their persecuted heroines. Everything had to be interpreted
for Anna. Her opinions about the smallest and most commonplace things
were gleaned from the Denver papers, the church weeklies, from sermons
and Sunday-School addresses. Scarcely anything was attractive to her in
its natural state--indeed, scarcely anything was decent until it was
clothed by the opinion of some authority. Her ideas about habit,
character, duty, love, marriage, were grouped under heads, like a book
of popular quotations, and were totally unrelated to the emergencies of
human living. She discussed all these subjects with other Methodist
girls of her age. They would spend hours, for instance, in deciding what
they would or would not tolerate in a suitor or a husband, and the
frailties of masculine nature were too often a subject of discussion
among them. In her behavior Anna was a harmless girl, mild except where
her prejudices were concerned, neat and industrious, with no graver
fault than priggishness; but her mind had really shocking habits of
classification. The wickedness of Denver and of Chicago, and even of
Moonstone, occupied her thoughts too much. She had none of the delicacy
that goes with a nature of warm impulses, but the kind of fishy
curiosity which justifies itself by an expression of horror.

Thea, and all Thea's ways and friends, seemed indecorous to Anna. She
not only felt a grave social discrimination against the Mexicans; she
could not forget that Spanish Johnny was a drunkard and that "nobody
knew what he did when he ran away from home." Thea pretended, of course,
that she liked the Mexicans because they were fond of music; but every
one knew that music was nothing very real, and that it did not matter in
a girl's relations with people. What was real, then, and what did
matter? Poor Anna!

Anna approved of Ray Kennedy as a young man of steady habits and
blameless life, but she regretted that he was an atheist, and that he
was not a passenger conductor with brass buttons on his coat. On the
whole, she wondere