nstead of no; and the measure would be adopted.
Pertaining to this custom was an inevitable sequel of plaintive
criticism from all the modest souls who "didn't like to speak," but who
were full of foreboding wisdom. Myrtle Hardy was one of the few who
could speak; and she was considered to speak very much to the point.
Those days, she was keenly interested in all the life of a young,
hopeful, bustling little western city. She belonged to a musical
society and would rise at five in the morning to practice, and she was
one of an anxious band of women who had bought a library and were
running an amateur entertainment bureau to support it. Then, Darrie was
in home-made knickerbockers; Myrtie was a sweet, little, loving hoyden
who was her mother's despair because she would climb trees in her white
frocks; Ralph was a baby, and the two little girls that died were their
mother's tiny helpers, with the willingest little hands and feet.
Sitting there in the crowded and noisy theater, a quiver ran over the
mother's face. Her friends had forgotten, the brothers and sisters had
forgotten, even Darius seemed to forget; but, day and night, she
remembered the eager little faces, lighting so happily at her praise,
the shining little heads that used to nestle against her heart. The two
died of scarlet fever in one terrible week. In that week, the first gray
threads had crept into Myrtle Hardy's beautiful brown hair. She was
nurse and comforter and helper, then, to Darius. She felt her eyes cloud
with the vision of him, as he flung himself on the babies' little bed,
sobbing in the terrible, racking passion of a man's grief. "Not now,
dear, not now, not till the others are safe," she had whispered; "we
have them still; they need us."

She wondered was it after the babies went that she began to drop out of
things. Somehow she was so busy comforting Darius and nursing the others
back to health, and crowding back her own ceaseless grief out of sight;
and thinking of cheerful things to say and new interests for the others,
that the library passed out of corporate existence and into endowed rest
with hardly a thought from her. Nearly at the same time, the musical
society perished in a cataclysm, due to the sensitive musical
temperament, and the literary society died of inanition, after browsing
through literature from Milton to Dante; and after each member had
written one or two papers, thus sating the natural curiosity of the
other members. M