"But what do you want with a pair of PANTS?" Aunt Nettie put in.
Missy wished Aunt Nettie had been invited out to supper; Aunt Nettie
was relentlessly inquisitive. She knew she must give some kind of
answer.

"Oh, just for some fancy-work," she said. She tried to make her tone
insouciant, but she was conscious of her cheeks getting hot.

"Fancy-work--pants for fancy-work! For heaven's sake!" ejaculated
Aunt Nettie.

Mother, also, was staring at her in surprise. But father, who was a
darling, put in: "Give 'em to her if she wants 'em, dear. Maybe
she'll make a lambrequin for the piano or an embroidered smoking-
jacket for the old man--a'la your Ladies' Home Companion."

He grinned at her, but Missy didn't mind father's jokes at her
expense so much as most grown-ups'. Besides she was grateful to him
for diverting attention from her secret purpose for the pants.

After supper, out in the summerhouse, it was an evening of such
swooning beauty she almost forgot the bothers vexing her life. When
you sit and watch the sun set in a bed of pastel glory, and let the
level bars of thick gold light steal across the soft slick grass to
reach to your very soul, and smell the heavenly sweetness of dew-
damp roses, and listen to the shrill yet mournful even-song of the
locusts--when you sit very still, just letting it all seep into you
and through and through you, such a beatific sense of peace surges
over you that, gradually, trivial things like athletic shortcomings
seem superficial and remote.