Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/72

62 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 turned upon her checked her thoughtless words. Life is bitter enough as it is without thinking of dreadful things in the future. I sometimes fear that underneath her girlish gayety Mabel Blossom conceals a morbid nature. But I am forgetting Josephine James. This story will tell why, with all her advantages of wealth and education and beauty, she remained a maiden lady till she was twenty-eight; and she might have kept on, too, if Kittie had not taken matters in hand and settled them for her.

Kittie says Josephine was always romantic and spent long hours of her young life in girlish reveries and dreams. Of course that isn't the way Kittie said it, but if I should tell this story in her crude, unformed fashion, you wouldn't read very far. What Kittie really said was that Josephine used to "moon around the grounds a lot and bawl, and even try to write poetry." I understand Josephine's nature, so I will go on and tell this story in my own way, but you must remember that some of the credit belongs to Kittie and Mabel Blossom; and if Sister Irmingarde reads it in class, they can stand right up with me when the author is called for.

Well, when Josephine James graduated she got a lot of prizes and things, for she was a clever girl, and had not spent all her time writing poetry and thinking deep thoughts about life. She realized the priceless advantages of a broad and thorough education and of association with the most cultivated minds. That sentence comes out of our prospectus. Then she went home and went out a good deal, and was very popular and stopped writing poetry, and her dear parents began to feel happy and hopeful about her, and think she would marry and have a nice family, which is indeed woman's highest, noblest mission in life. But all the time Josephine cherished an ideal.

A great many young men came to see her, and Kittie liked one of them very much indeed—better than all the others. He was handsome, and he laughed and joked a good deal, and always brought Kittie big boxes of candy and called her his little sister. He said she was going to be that in the end, anyhow, and there was no use waiting to give her the title that his heart dictated. He said it just that way. When he took Josephine out in his automobile he'd say, "Let's take the kid, too," and they would, and it did not take Kittie long to understand how things were between George Morgan—for that was indeed his name—and her sister. Little do grown-up people realize how intelligent are the minds of the young, and how keen and penetrating their youthful gaze! Clearly do I recall some things that happened at home, and it would startle papa and mamma to know I know them, but I will not reveal them here. Once I would have done so, in the beginning of my art; but now I have learned to finish one story before I begin another.

Little did Mr. Morgan and Josephine wot that every time she refused him Kittie's young heart burned beneath its sense of wrong, for she did refuse him almost every time they went out together, and yet she kept right on going. You would think she wouldn't, but women's natures are indeed inscrutable. Some authors would stop here and tell what was in Josephine's heart, but this is not that kind of a story. Kittie was only twelve then, and they used big words and talked in a queer way they thought she would not understand; but she did, every time, and she never missed a single word they said. Of course she wasn't listening exactly, you see, because they knew she was there. That makes it different and quite proper. For if Kittie was more intelligent than her elders it was not the poor child's fault.

Things went on like that and got worse and worse, and they had been going on that way for five years. One day Kittie was playing tennis with George at the Country Club, and he had been very kind to her, and all of a sudden Kittie told him she knew all, and how sorry she was for him, and that if he would wait till she grew up she would marry him herself. The poor child was so young, you see, that she did not know how unmaidenly this was. And of course at St. Catharine's when they taught us how to enter and leave rooms and how to