s messages over the phone the day before--and why did
he remember the day at all, if it were only to tell her that she
was too young to really know her own mind. The change--whatever it
was--had taken place in the interval of his phoning, and her visit,
and Mrs. Crocks had said that a committee had gone to see him and
offer him the nomination! What difference would that make? The subtle
suggestion of the senator's daughter came back to her mind! Was it
possible--that the Watson family were--what she had once read of in an
English story--'socially impossible.' Pearl remembered the phrase. The
thought struck her with such an impact that she pulled her horse up
with a jerk, and stood on the road in deep abstraction.

She remembered the quarrel she had once had with a girl at school. It
all came back in a flash of rage that lit up this forgotten corner of
her memory! The cause of the quarrel did not appear in the record, but
that the girl had flung it at her that her people were nothing and
nobody--her mother a washerwoman and her father a section hand--now
stood out in letters of flame! Pearl had not been angry at the
time--and she remembered that her only reason for taking out the
miserable little shrimp and washing her face in the snow was that
she knew the girl had said this to be very mean, and with the pretty
certain hope that it would cut deep! She was a sorrel-topped, anaemic,
scrawny little thing, who ate slate-pencils and chewed paper, and she
had gone crying to the teacher with the story of Pearl's violence
against her.

Mr. Donald had found out the cause, and had spoken so nicely to Pearl
about it, that her heart was greatly lifted as a result, and the
incident became a pleasant recollection, with only the delightful
part remaining, until this moment. Mr. Donald had said that Pearl was
surely a lucky girl, when the worst thing that could be said to her
was that her two parents had been engaged in useful and honorable
work--and he had made this the topic for a lesson that afternoon in
showing how all work is necessary and all honorable. Out of the lesson
had grown a game which they often played on Friday afternoons, when a
familiar object was selected and all the pupils required to write
down the names of all the workers who had been needed to bring it to
perfection.

And the next day when lunch time came, Mr. Donald told them he had
been thinking about the incident, and how all that we enjoy in life
comes to