IN MISS MAJOR'S ROOM

When Russell Holiday and his wife named their only child June, they
planned to make her life one long summer holiday. For eighteen
years success went hand in hand with their desire; then an
unfortunate marriage plunged the joyous girl into bleak November.
She grew to hate her happy name. But with the passing of the man
she called husband much of the bitterness vanished, and she began
to plan for others.

"I want this Home to be as beautiful as money can make it and as
full of joy as a June holiday," she told her approving lawyer.
"There must be no age limit. It shall welcome as freely the woman
of forty as her mother or her grandmother. I will gather in the
needy of any sect or race,--the oppressed, the disabled, the
sorrowful, and the lonely,--and as much as can be give to them the
freedom and happiness of a delightful home."

In just one week from the day the ground was broken for the big
building, a drunken chauffeur drove the donor and her lawyer to
their death, and the institution was continued in a totally
different way from that intended by the two who could make no
protest.

To be sure, it stood at last, in gray granite magnificence, on the
crest of Edgewood Hill, a palace without and within; but to those
for whom it was built had never come, through the years of its
being, a single June holiday.