t shopping for short clothes and babyfied hats. Soon we moved
away from that hotel to one on the north side, where nobody had seen us;
and the first thing I knew, I was a little girl again.

It certainly was fun. To really appreciate being a child, you ought to
have been grown up in another state of existence, and remember your
sensations. It was something like that with me, and my life was almost
as good as a play. I could say and do dreadfully naughty things, which
would have been outrageous for a grown-up young lady of nearly
seventeen. And _didn't_ I do them all? I never missed a single chance,
and I flatter myself that I haven't since.

The French madame made a real work of art of Mamma. The progress was
lovely to watch. She kept herself shut up in her room all day,
pretending to be an invalid, and drove out in a veil to the madame's.
Then, when she was finished, we went right away from Chicago to New
York, where we meant to stay for a while till we sailed for Europe.

Mamma hadn't been East before, since she was a girl of twenty, for that
was when she married Papa, and he took her to live in Denver. We bought
lots of beautiful things in New York, and Mamma enjoyed herself so much,
being pretty and having people stare at her, that she was almost sick
from excitement.

When we'd seen all the sights and were tired of shopping, she remembered
that she'd got a niece staying in the country not far away, on the
Hudson River. I'd heard Mamma speak of her sister, who, when seventeen,
had married a Savant (whatever that is), and had gone to California soon
afterwards, because she was delicate. But evidently the change hadn't
done her much good, because she died when her baby was born. The Savant
went on living, but he couldn't love his daughter properly, as she'd
been the cause of her mother's death. Besides, he wasn't the kind of man
to understand children, so when Madeleine was nine or ten, he sent her
to a school--a very queer school. It was kept by a Sisterhood; not nuns
exactly, because they were Protestants, but almost as good or as bad;
and an elderly female cousin of the Savant's was the head of the
institution.

There Madeleine Destrey had been ever since, though Mamma said she must
be nineteen or twenty; and now her father was dead. That news had been
sent to Mamma months before we left Denver, but as she and the Savant
had written to each other only about once every five or six years, it
hadn't affected her