to choose this and to hold to it in the
face of the other two. It was the last battle of that campaign. I had
my way; but I wondered privately to myself whether I was going to look
very unlike the children of other ladies in my mother's position: and
whether such severity over myself was really needed. I turned the
question over again in my own room, and tried to find out why it
troubled me. I could not quite tell. Yet I thought, as I was doing
what I knew to be duty, I had no right to feel this trouble about it.
The trouble wore off before a little thought of my poor friends at
Magnolia. But the question came up again at dinner.

"Daisy," said Mrs. Sandford, "did you ever have anything to do with
the Methodists?"

"No, ma'am," I said, wondering. "What are the Methodists?"

"I don't know, I am sure," she said, laughing, "only they are people
who sing hymns a great deal, and teach that nobody ought to wear gay
dresses."

"Why?" I asked.

"I can't say. I believe they hold that the Bible forbids ornamenting
ourselves."

I wondered if it did; and determined I would look. And I thought the
Methodists must be nice people.

"What is on the carpet now?" said the doctor. "Singing or dressing?
You are attacking Daisy, I see, on some score."

"She won't have her dress trimmed," said Mrs. Sandford.

The doctor turned round to me, with a wonderful genial pleasant
expression of his fine face; and his blue eye, that I always liked to
meet full, going through me with a sort of soft power. He was not
smiling, yet his look made me smile.

"Daisy," said he, "are you going to make yourself unlike other
people?"

"Only my dress, Dr. Sandford," I said.

"L'habit, c'est l'homme!--" he answered gravely, shaking his head.

I remembered his question and words many times in the course of the
next six months.

In a day or two more my dress was done, and Dr. Sandford went with me
to introduce me at the school. He had already made the necessary
arrangements. It was a large establishment, reckoned the most
fashionable, and at the same time one of the most thorough, in the
city; the house, or houses, standing in one of the broad clear
Avenues, where the streams of human life that went up and down were
all of the sort that wore trimmed dresses and rolled about in handsome
carriages. Just in the centre and height of the thoroughfare Mme.
Ricard's establishment looked over it. We went in at a stately
doorway, and were shown into a ver