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 ant and wrote feverishly in odd moments anything that would sell, it hardly mattered what. Lanice had recently gone to see Louisa and the two girls crept to the attic for privacy and seated on the rag-bag exchanged ambitions.

'I must make money. I will teach, act, write stories. Lanice, I'll even sell my one beauty, my hair. I must get some comforts for Marmee. Oh, we've been so poor my soul is all ragged.'

Miss Alcott—Louisa she called her—was the liveliest of all the literary friends she had made through her profession. She liked her boyishness, her candor, her trusty whole-heartedness, and even her gawkiness in the presence of the unsympathetic.

But Lydia, and to a less extent the more mannered Elpsie, she came to love. Pauline despised the pretty girls with their brisk gold hair, their sweet-pea faces, and defiant blue eyes. She flattered them outrageously, but in a way to belittle them. Lydia was clever enough to see through this flattery which favorably impressed her younger sister, especially coming as it did from so high-minded a source as Miss Pauline Poggy. They were much about the Poggy house, sometimes sleeping with Lanice, three in a bed. The three girls, mounted on little round gentle horses that were considered appropriate mounts for females, although their small size and pony backs unfitted them for the cumbersome side-saddles, ambled about the country roads of Brookline or followed the windings of the Charles. A groom followed them wherever they went and gave them the help they must have in