"A rose with all its sweetest leaves yet folded."
"Miss Prudence! O, Miss Prudence!"
It was summer time and Marjorie was almost fourteen years old. Her soul was looking out of troubled eyes to-day. Just now life was all one unanswered question.
"Marjorie! O, Marjorie!" mimicked Miss Prudence.
"I don't know what desultory means," said Marjorie.
"And you don't know where to find a dictionary?"
"Mustn't I ask you questions when I can find the answer myself?" asked
Marjorie, straightforwardly.
"I think it's rather impertinent, don't you?"
"Yes," considered Marjorie, "rather."
Miss Prudence was a fair vision in Marjorie's eyes and Marjorie was a radiant vision in Miss Prudence's eyes. The radiant vision was not clothed in gorgeous apparel; the radiance was in the face and voice and in every motion; the apparel was simply a stiffly starched blue muslin, that had once belonged to Linnet and had been "let down" for Marjorie, and her head was crowned with a broad-brimmed straw hat, around the crown of which was tied a somewhat faded blue ribbon, also a relic of Linnet's summer days; her linen collar was fastened with an old-fashioned pin of her mother's; her boots were new and neatly fitting, her father had made them especially for herself.