much out of fashion as the Rollo books."

"But we are unconscious heroines, you understand," I explained.
"While we were experiencing our experiences we did not notice them,
but they have attained by degrees a sufficient bulk so that they are
visible to the naked eye. We can look back now and perceive the
path we have travelled."

"It isn't retrospect I object to, but anticipation," she retorted;
"not history, but prophecy. It is one thing to gaze sentimentally
at the road you have travelled, quite another to conjure up
impossible pictures of the future."

Salemina calls herself a trifle over forty, but I am not certain of
her age, and think perhaps that she is uncertain herself. She has
good reason to forget it, and so have we. Of course she could
consult the Bible family record daily, but if she consulted her
looking-glass afterward the one impression would always nullify the
other. Her hair is silvered, it is true, but that is so clearly a
trick of Nature that it makes her look younger rather than older.

Francesca came into the room just here. I said a moment ago that
she was the same old Francesca, but I was wrong; she is softening,
sweetening, expanding; in a word, blooming. Not only this, but
Ronald Macdonald's likeness has been stamped upon her in some
magical way, so that, although she has not lost her own personality,
she seems to have added a reflection of his. In the glimpses of
herself, her views, feelings, opinions, convictions, which she gives
us in a kind of solution, as it were, there are always traces of
Ronald Macdonald; or, to be more poetical, he seems to have bent