ry
imaginable self-denial themselves, are always afraid the first
renunciation will kill their child. Sooner or later they are going to
learn what life is. I know a little girl whose parents are
multi-millionaires, and who is going to be told some day soon that her
two older sisters aren't living abroad, as she thinks, but shut up for
life, within a few miles of her. What worse blow could life give to the
poorest girl?"

"Horrors!" murmured Mrs. Brown.

"And those are common cases," Mrs. Burgoyne said eagerly, "I knew of so
many! Pretty little girls at European watering-places whose mothers are
spending thousands, and hundreds of thousands of dollars to get out of
their blood what no earthly power can do away with. Sons of rich
fathers whose valets themselves wouldn't change places with them! And
then the fine, clean, industrious middle-classes--or upper classes,
really, for the blood in their veins is the finest in the world--are
afraid to bring children into the world because of dancing cotillions
and motor-cars!"

"Well, of course I have only four," said Mrs. Brown, "but I've been
married only seven years--"

Mrs. Burgoyne laughed, came to a full stop, and reddened a little as
she went back busily to her sewing.

"Why do you let me run on at such a rate; you know my hobbies now!" she
reproached them. "I am not quite sane on the subject of what ought to
be done--and isn't--in that good old institution called woman's sphere."

"That sounds vaguely familiar," said Mrs. Lloyd.

"Woman's sphere? Yes, we hate the sound of it," said Mrs. Burgoyne,
"just as a man who has left his family hates to talk of home ties, and
just as a deserter hates the conversation to come around to the army.
But it's true. Our business is children, and kitchens, and husbands,
and meals, and we detest it all--"

"I like my husband a little," said Mrs. Brown, in a meek little voice.

They all laughed. Then said Mrs. Lloyd, gazing sentimentally toward the
river bank, where her small daughter's twisted curls were tossing madly
in a game of "tag":

"I shall henceforth regard Mabel as a possible Joan of Arc."

"One of those boys MAY be a Lincoln, or a Thomas Edison, or a Mark
Twain," Sidney Burgoyne added, half-laughing, "and then we'll feel just
a little ashamed for having turned him complacently over to a nurse or
a boarding school. Of course, it leaves us free to go to the club and
hear a paper on the childhood of Napoleon, carefully c