Catherine, meanwhile, having slipped the balls one by one into the
pocket of her steamer chair, rested her long white hands upon the chair
arms and sat quietly, hearing nothing of Mr. Chapman's statistics, her
brown eyes dreamily fixed upon the sloping lawn, but seeing instead the
Dexter campus, across which girls were moving, as she loved best to see
them, in pretty light gowns on the way to evening chapel. Among them all
her thought rested most lovingly upon a little girl with a plain face
and big round glasses. "You dear old Alice!" she murmured, almost aloud,
and roused herself guiltily to hear Algernon saying:

"There are a lot of wide-awake men in Pittsburg."

"Wide-awake girls in Winsted!"

This time Catherine really did speak aloud, and Algernon looked up in
surprised inquiry.

"I beg your pardon," she said contritely. "It was very rude of me, but
you set me off, yourself. The Wide Awake Girls are really going to be in
Winsted this summer. Don't you know about them?" as Algernon still
looked puzzled.

"Why, no. All the Winsted girls seem wide-awake enough, I should say."

"But I'm the only one who has a right to be called so in capital
letters. I'll tell you all about it, but it has been such an important
part of my life for the last year and more, that I forget every one who
knows me doesn't know about it all.

"You see, about two years ago, when I was fifteen and Hannah Eldred, who
lives in Massachusetts, was not quite fourteen, she wrote a letter to
_Wide-Awake_, the magazine, you know, asking for correspondents.
And I answered it. Several other girls did, too. One was Alice Prescott,
who lives out in Washington, and another was Frieda Lange, of Berlin,
whose mother had known Mrs. Eldred in Germany years ago. Hannah kept on
writing to the three of us, and before the end of the year she had met
us all and really lived with each of us in turn. It doesn't sound
probable, but it came about naturally enough. The Eldreds went to Berlin
for a few months and boarded at the Langes'. Then Mrs. Eldred's mother
was taken ill, and they had to come back to this country. The
grandmother lived over here at Delmar, and Father was called in
consultation and brought Hannah back to stay with me a little while; and
then, as her mother couldn't leave, they sent Hannah to Dexter, to the
preparatory department, and there she found Alice, whom she had lost
sight of for a long time. Then when I went to Dexter, I learned to kn