Page:Margaret Sherwood--A Puritan in Bohemia.djvu/43

A Puritan Bohemia "I called on my new neighbour yesterday," said Anne, as she strolled one day with Mrs. Kent about the Square. "She's charming. She has spent a year in a woman's college, and is very wise. Now she's going to make the world all over."

"Don't laugh at her," begged Mrs. Kent.

"I'm not laughing at her. I like her immensely. She belongs to a wealthy old Connecticut family. Their religious, social, and economic views are not to her mind. Her criticism of her unenlightened parents rather stuns one. She has come on a mission to us, because her conscience won't permit her to stay at home. It used to be the bad boy who ran away from home. Now it's the good girl, in search of philanthropic adventure."

Mrs. Kent smiled.

"The child is brimful of that vain, hungry, ungenerous idealism of the young," continued Anne. "Heaven deliver us all from the abstract wisdom of the utterly untried!"

"Is she an artist?"