o smash
windows and scream."

"Why, Nellie!" Miss Enid's mournful eyes filled with tears. Instantly
Eleanor was all contrition.

"I'm sorry!" she said, with a real kiss this time. "I'll behave. Give you
my word I will!" And, with an affectionate squeeze of the hand that
clasped hers, she ran up the steps.

The upper hall, like the rest of the house, was pervaded by an air of
gloomy grandeur. Everything was dreary, formal, fixed. Not an ornament or
a picture had been changed since Eleanor could remember. She was the only
young thing about the place, and it always seemed to her as if the house
and its occupants were conspiring to make her old and staid and stupid,
like themselves.

At the door of her grandmother's room she paused. As far back as she
could remember, her quarrels with her grandmother had been the most
terrifying events of her life. Repetition never robbed them of their
horror, and no amount of spoiling between times could make up to her for
the violence of the moment. It took all the courage she had to turn the
knob of the door and enter.

A brigadier-general planning an important campaign would have presented
no more commanding presence than did the formidable old lady who sat at a
flat-top desk, issuing orders in a loud, decisive tone to a small
meek-looking man who stood before her. The most arresting feature about
Madam Bartlett was a towering white pompadour that began where most
pompadours end, and soared to a surprising height above her large,
handsome, masculine face. The fact that her hair line had gradually
receded from her forehead to the top of her head affected no change
whatever in the arrangement of her coiffure. Neither in regard to her
hair nor to her figure had she yielded one iota to the whims of Nature.
Her body was still confined in the stiffest of stays, and in spite of her
seventy years was as straight as an arrow. At Eleanor's entrance she
motioned her peremptorily to a chair and proceeded with the business in
hand.

"You go back and tell Mr. Bangs," she was saying to the meek-looking
person, "that I want him to send somebody up here who knows more than you
do. Do you understand?"

The meek one evidently understood, for he reached nervously for his cap.

"Wait!" commanded Madam peremptorily. "Don't start off like that, while I
am talking to you! Tell Mr. Bangs this is the third time I've asked him
to send me the report of Bartlett & Bangs' export business for the past
year