ting attention from her secret purpose for the pants.

After supper, out in the summerhouse, it was an evening of such swooning
beauty she almost forgot the bothers vexing her life. When you sit and
watch the sun set in a bed of pastel glory, and let the level bars of
thick gold light steal across the soft slick grass to reach to your very
soul, and smell the heavenly sweetness of dew-damp roses, and listen
to the shrill yet mournful even-song of the locusts--when you sit very
still, just letting it all seep into you and through and through you,
such a beatific sense of peace surges over you that, gradually, trivial
things like athletic shortcomings seem superficial and remote.

Later, too, up in her room, slowly undressing in the moonlight, she let
herself yield to the sweeter spell. She loved her room, especially when
but dimly lit by soft white strips of the moon through the window. She
loved the dotted Swiss curtains blowing, and the white-valanced little
bed, and the white-valanced little dressing-table all dim and misty
save where a broad shaft of light gave a divine patch of illumination to
undress by. She said her prayers on her knees by the window, where she
could keep open but unsacrilegious eyes on God's handiwork outside--the
divine miracle of everyday things transformed into shimmering glory.

A soft brushing against her ankles told her that Poppylinda, her cat,
had come to say good night. She lifted her pet up to the sill.

"See the beautiful night, Poppy," she said. "See!--it's just like a
great, soft, lovely, blue-silver bed!"

Poppy gave a gentle purr of acquiescence. Missy was sure it was
acquiescence. She was convinced that Poppy had a fine, appreciative,
discriminating mind. Aunt Nettie scouted at this; she denied that she
disliked Poppy, but said she "liked cats in their place." Missy knew
this meant, of course, that inwardly she loathed cats; that she
regarded them merely as something which musses up counterpanes and keeps
outlandish hours. Aunt Nettie was perpetually finding fault with Poppy;
but Missy had noted that Aunt Nettie and all the others who emphasized
Poppy's imperfections were people whom Poppy, in her turn, for some
reason could not endure. This point she tried to make once when Poppy
had been convicted of a felonious scratch, but of course the grown-ups
couldn't follow her reasoning. Long since she'd given up trying to make
clear the real merits of her pet; she only knew that Popp