badly. You will make a great mistake,
Virginia. Of course, dear, you have passed through a very unpleasant
experience, which I am all the more able to appreciate from having had,
as you are aware, sorrows of a similar kind. But painful as such
experiences are for those called upon to undergo them, they are, I
regret to say, far from uncommon; and if a young person who has suffered
a disappointment were to turn his or her back on all entertainments,
what, pray, would become of society?"

"Society will get along very well without me," I answered.

Aunt Helen knitted rapidly in silence, and the color mounted to her
cheeks.

"You will make a great mistake, Virginia," she repeated,--"a great
mistake. No young lady of your age can afford to make herself
conspicuous by acting differently from other people. Do you wish to be
called eccentric and peculiar?"

"I don't much care," said I with a spice of wickedness. "It might be
rather attractive, I should think, to be different from everybody else."

"I can imagine who has been putting such ideas into your head. In my
opinion one strong-minded woman in the family is quite enough," she said
with a toss of her head.

I knew that she referred to Aunt Agnes, who had returned from Europe a
few weeks before; therefore I said,--

"I have not exchanged a word with anybody on the subject."

"What _is_ the reason, then, that you persist in being so contrary?" she
exclaimed in a thoroughly worried tone, laying down her work on her lap.

"Because I have awakened to the fact that the little circle in which we
move does not constitute the world," I answered, rather nettled by her
solicitude. "I live as completely hedged about by conventions as the
sleeping Beauty by the growth of a hundred years."

She opened her eyes in amazement. "All women in every circle except the
very lowest are hedged about by conventions," she replied severely.
"What is it you wish to do?"

"I don't know that I wish to do anything. I am waiting for something to
suggest itself."

"Does your father know of this?" she asked.

"Of what?"

"Of your intention to give up society."

"I have not thought it important enough to mention it to him."

"Important enough? I shall feel it my duty to inform him. We shall hear
next that you have gone on the stage, or done something equally
extraordinary."

"What do you mean?" I inquired with a wondering laugh.

"I have merely taken you at your own words. You have e