vacation.

"And when you think," said she, "that some women spend the best years of
their lives making _statues_!"





I


The number of love affairs which intervened between Barbara Ferris's
first one, when she was eleven, and her twenty-second birthday could not
have been counted on the fingers of her two hands. Many boys, many men,
had seemed wonderfully attractive to her. She did not know why. She knew
only that the attraction seemed strong and eternal while it lasted, and
that it never lasted long. She was sixteen before she began to consider
herself a heartless, flirtatious, unstable, jilting sort of a girl. When
she made this discovery, she was terribly ashamed, and for one long
depressing year fell in love with nobody, became very shy, and hated
herself. It was during this year that she had her first, last, and only
touch of mania. It lasted only a little while and was not acute. She got
the idea that she was being watched, spied on, and followed. But she was
too strong in body and mind to give in for long to so silly an
hallucination. And when she had dismissed the second man and her maid,
who had particularly excited her suspicions, the mania left her, as a
dream leaves at waking.

In her seventeenth year she was presented to society, and became an