couldn’t run away from his studies.

Moreover, old Dr. Mazetti had no money to spend upon toys and clothes. The Taylors took no interest in Dante or any other poet, but they took Ethel to the circus; so she said she wanted to live with Aunt Amy, her father’s sister.

She wasn’t aware, at the time, how terribly she had hurt the Mazettis. They said very little. Indeed, they discussed it in private, and decided that it was their duty to say very little. Aunt Amy could give Ethel material benefits which they could not give; and if the child preferred that sort of thing, it was, after all, neither unnatural nor unexpected.

“Each must find his own,” said Dr. Mazetti. “What is joy for one is a burden for another.”

So they let her go, and they did it beautifully, without saddening her little heart with reproaches or tears. She came back to visit them once a month or so, but somehow, in her new existence, this quiet old couple had begun to seem very foreign, very unreal.

She was abroad with her aunt when Dr. Mazetti died. Though she grieved for him honestly, she was too young and too busy to nourish any sorrow long.

When Ethel Taylor came home, at nineteen, her grandmother seemed like a little ghost from the past, utterly unconnected with her present life. She still went to visit the old lady, and sat in the familiar room in her little cottage, where the bronze bust of Dante appeared to impose a dignified calm; but these visits were nothing but interludes to real life, and real life, just now, was a miserable thing.

The trouble was that Aunt Amy kept on being Aunt Amy, while the childish Ethel and the nineteen-year-old one were entirely different persons. Aunt Amy wanted her to come out, and to be a nice, happy débutante like other girls; but something in Ethel’s blood rebelled against that. She called it a “modern spirit,” and never realized that instead of being modern, it was the old Mazetti strain, come down to her from people who for generations had not lived by bread alone.

She told her aunt that she wanted to be a singer.

“That’s a charming accomplishment,” said Aunt Amy affably.

“I mean I want really to study—for years and years!”

“Certainly, dear, if you can find the time.”

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