restful, so calming to walk on dear nature's breast. Maudie Joyce and
Mabel Blossom always know the minute an attack of artistic temperament
begins in me. Then they go away quietly and reverently, and I write a
story and feel better.

So this time I am going to tell about Kittie James's sister Josephine.
In the very beginning I must explain that Josephine James used to be a
pupil at St. Catharine's herself, ages and ages ago, and finally she
graduated and left, and began to go into society and look around and
decide what her life-work should be. That was long, long before our
time--as much as ten years, I should think, and poor Josephine must be
twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old now. But Kittie says she is just
as nice as she can be, and not a bit poky, and so active and interested
in life you'd think she was young. Of course I know such things can be,
for my own sister Grace, Mrs. George E. Verbeck, is perfectly lovely and
the most popular woman in the society of our city. But Grace is married,
and perhaps that makes a difference. It is said that love keeps the
spirit young. However, perhaps I'd better go on about Josephine and not
dwell on that. Experienced as we girls are, and drinking of life in deep
draughts though we do, we still admit--Maudie, Mabel, and I--that we do
not yet know much about love. But one cannot know everything at fifteen,
and, as Mabel Blossom always says, "there is yet time." We all know
just the kind of men they're going to be, though. Mine will be a brave
young officer, of course, for a general's daughter should not marry out
of the army, and he will die for his country, leaving me with a broken
heart. Maudie Joyce says hers must be a man who will rule her with a rod
of iron and break her will and win her respect, and then be gentle and
loving and tender. And Mabel Blossom says she's perfectly sure hers will
be fat and have a blond mustache and laugh a great deal. Once she said
maybe none of us would ever get _any_; but the look Maudie Joyce and I