distracting young person. Few looked at her once without wanting to look
again, and not a few looked again to their undoing.

Being-done-good-to is, I understand, much in vogue in the purlieus of
Fifth Avenue where it is practiced with skill and persistence by a large
and needy cult of grateful recipients. Our Square doesn't take to it. As
recipients we are, I fear, grudgingly grateful. So when Miss Holland
transferred her enthusiasms and activities to our far-away corner of the
world she met with a lack of response which might have discouraged one
with a less new and superior sense of duty to the lower orders. She came
to us through the Bonnie Lassie, guardian of the gateway from the upper
strata to our humbler domain, who--Pagan that she is!--indiscriminately
accepts all things beautiful simply for their beauty. Having arrived,
Miss Holland proceeded to organize us with all the energy of
high-blooded sweet-and-twenty and all the imperiousness of confident
wealth and beauty. She organized an evening sewing-circle for women
whose eyelids would not stay open after their long day's work. She
formed cultural improvement classes for such as Leon Coventry, the
printer, who knows half the literatures of the world, and MacLachan, the
tailor, to whom Carlyle is by way of being light reading. She delivered
some edifying exhortations upon the subject of Americanism to Polyglot
Elsa, of the Élite Restaurant (who had taken upon her sturdy young
shoulders the support of an old mother and a paralytic sister, so that
her two brothers might enlist for the war--a detail of patriotism which
the dispenser of platitudes might have learned by judicious inquiry).
And so forth and so on. Miss Roberta Holland meant well, but she had
many things to learn and no master to teach her.

Yet when the flu epidemic returned upon us, she stood by, efficient,
deft, and gallant, though still imperious, until the day when she