and which sometimes brought her great satisfaction and sometimes nothing but dissatisfaction.

"Don't frown like that, Rebecca Mary," she commanded like a general speaking to a very small private. "It is a lot easier to put a wrinkle in your forehead than it is to get one out as you'll learn some day. And while we are on the subject of your looks I'm going to take an old cousin's privilege and tell you what I think of you. It's a shame to do it here," she acknowledged ruefully, "but if I take the six-twenty train I shan't have another chance. You know," she went on in a firm low voice, "I don't like the way you live, and your mother wouldn't like it[Pg 11] if she knew. Why, you don't get a thing out of your life, Rebecca Mary, not a thing!"

[Pg 11]

"I don't see what I can do," murmured Rebecca Mary with a twist of her shoulders and a rebellious flash in her gray eyes. "You needn't think I like my life, Cousin Susan. It isn't one I should ever choose. I should say not! But I try to make the best of it."

"But you don't make the best of it. That is just the point. You make such a horrid worst of it. Yes, you do!" as Rebecca Mary indignantly declared that she didn't. "Listen. I've watched you and I never imagined a girl could detach herself from life, real life, as you have done. You haven't any friends, you don't go anywhere but to school, you don't do anything but teach the third grade in the Lincoln school."

At that Rebecca Mary did interrupt and there was a bright red spot on each of her cheeks, like a poppy in a bed of lilies. "It costs money to have a share in real life," she said in a suppressed voice which made you think how very thin the crust of earth around a volcano must be. "And I haven't any money. You know how awfully little we have and how much it costs to live now. I have to send something home every month and there are always taxes and insurance. And I have to provide for my old age! You[Pg 12] have no idea what a nightmare that is," tragically. "I wake up in the night thinking what will happen when I'm too old to teach. It's—it's ghastly!" It was so ghastly that she shivered, and the poppies left her face so that it was just a field of white lilies.

[Pg 12]

"You are thinking entirely too much of your old age. You are robbing your youth for it. It is perfectly ridiculous for you to make such a nightmare of the future. I know it isn't entirely your fault. Your mother is rabid on the subject. She has brought you 

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