er going to get over
it--not entirely. I miss the old Mary." Grace stopped to steady her
voice. "But when I went up with her to her room to talk to her while
she dressed for dinner, she put up her hair in that pretty boyish way
that she used to wear it, and it was all for Roger Poole."

"Why not for Porter?"

"Because she hasn't cared how she looked, and Porter has been there
every day. He has been there too often."

"Do you think Roger will try to get her to marry him?"

"Who knows? He's dead in love with her. But he looks upon her as too
rare for the life he leads. That's the trouble with men. They are
afraid they can't make the right woman happy, so they ask the wrong
one. Now if we women could do the proposing----"

"Grace!"

"Don't look at me in that shocked way, mother. I am just voicing what
every woman knows--that the men who ask her aren't the ones she would
have picked out if she had had the choice. And Mary will wait and
weary, and Roger will worship and hang back, and in the meantime Porter
will demand and demand and demand--and in the end he'll probably get
what he wants."

Aunt Frances beamed. "I hope so."

"But Mary will be miserable."

"Then she'll be very silly."

Grace sighed. "No woman is silly who asks for the best. Mother, I'd
love to marry a man with a mission--I'd like to go to the South Sea
Islands and teach the natives, or to Darkest Africa--or to China, or
India, anywhere away from a life in which there's nothing but bridge,
and shopping, and deadly dullness."

She was in earnest now, and her mother saw it.

"I don't see how you can say such things," she quavered. "I don't see
how you can talk of going to such impossible places--away from me."

Grace cut short the plaintive wail.

"Of course I have no idea of going," she said, "but such a life would
furnish its own adventures; I wouldn't have to manufacture them."

It was with the wish to make life something more than it was that Grace
asked Roger the next day, "Is there any work here in town like yours
for the boy--you see Mary has told me about him."

He smiled. "Everywhere there are boys and girls, unawakened--if only
people would look for them; and with your knowledge of languages you
could do great things with the little foreigners--turn a bunch of them
into good citizens, for example."

"How?"

"Reach them first through pictures and music--then through their
patriotism. Don't let them learn politic