a flight of asterisks. Flowers subdivided themselves before her like a tartan plaid. She saw human beings in tenuous and disjointed outlines suggestive of a daddy-long-legs. She could not afford paint and canvas, so she had to leave people to think that the world looked much as usual.

Eurydice had always felt that she could write out her thoughts as soon as she and Stella were alone and able to arrange her room in black and scarlet. When Cicely left, Stella bought black paper and pasted it over the walls, and dyed a white-wool mat, which had long lost its original purity, a sinister scarlet.

Eurydice did not want very much, either. None of the Warings wanted very much. What as a family they failed to understand was, that not having the money to pay for what they wanted, some more personal contribution of time and effort was necessary in order to attain it.

Stella grasped this fact when she was about eighteen. She said afterward that she never would have thought of it if it had not been made plain to her by Cicely. Still, before Cicely had gone to the hospital Stella was taking cheap lessons in the City in shorthand and type-writing. None of the three girls had what is called any "youth." They were as ignorant of young men as if they had been brought up in a convent. Neither Professor nor Mrs. Waring had ever supposed that parents ought to provide occupations or social resources for their children, and the children themselves had been too busy contributing to the family welfare to manage any other life. Cicely had read statistics and mastered physiological facts at fifteen. She was under the impression that she knew everything and disliked everything except work. Her feeling for men was singularly like that of a medieval and devout monk toward women. She had an uncomfortable knowledge of them as a necessary evil, to be evaded only by truculence or flight. When her work forced her into dealings with them, she was ferocious and unattractive. She was a pretty girl, but nobody had ever dared to mention it to her.

Even Stella, who in an unaggressive, flitting way dared most questions, had avoided telling Cicely that she herself liked men. Stella often felt that if she could meet a man who was capable of doing all kinds of dull things for you, very charmingly, and had a pretty wit, it would add quite enormously to the gaiety of life to put yourself out a little in order to make him laugh.

The men Stella worked with wouldn't have done at all. They wouldn't have cared for the kind of jokes Stella wanted to make, 

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