When she had closed the front door behind him he scratched upon the oldfashioned panel of ground glass and demanded to be let in again.

"I feel as if I had n't said it often enough," he told her.

"Said what?" asked Norah, though she knew.

Norah's girlhood had been oppressed by the superiority of her older sisters. One of them was beautiful, and ways of ease and delight were open to her. The other was clever, and had graduated from Radcliffe with the highest honors which that institution had to bestow. Norah's hopes of a college education were blocked by her inability to understand any but the rudiments of mathematics. This mental weakness had been apparent in her school days. "And there is no use of sending a girl to college when she has nothing but an average mind," said her mother, who was also influenced by the difficulty of financing beauty and the higher education.

It was a relief to the family that Norah was not worth expensive cultivation and could be made useful in the home groove.

But Norah hated the groove. One day she secretly put on one of Helen's beautiful dresses, and looked in the glass. After this she thought of herself as Cinderella.

"I might be just a little charming if some one would like me," she thought. "But no one will like me until I am charming, and so-"

It seemed a hopeless case. It seemed as if the groove would go on forever and ever. She began to call it a rut.

Leaving her 'teens behind her, Norah left the dream of Cinderella. She saw herself as an average case. There were many women oppressed and repressed as she was. She saw herself as a platitude, also as a tragedy, and wished she had been born a man. These beings were evidently stronger and happier creatures than women, and could get out of ruts

even when they had only average capacity like her own.

Norah felt she would never get out, for she was one who found it hard to fight. In family life a contest of wills is often a test of dispositions. The member who is willing to be the most unpleasant in order to get her own way is usually the one who has it, and when it came to making herself unpleasant, Norah's capacity was small.

She was twenty-two when her mother died. This left her an orphan and changed everything. Helen had planned to pass the following winter cruising in Southern waters with the rich and great. Kate had started the career which was expected to take her into the presidential chair of a woman's college. There seemed no reason why either of these life-works should be interrupted; but Norah was unprovided for. She was also poor, for when the property had been divided into thirds her individual share was small. It was then that Aunt

Frances Kingsley invited her to come and stay for a year or so. Mrs. Kingsley was a very rich woman who had not enough to do and was growing fretful about the care of her worldly goods. She thought of Norah as a competent little person who might make things easier; so Norah came, and there she met Henry. There was also Stephen Kingsley, a delicate boy, and the tutor, who was one of many who sought to prepare him for college.

When quite a small girl Norah had been taken to a football game in the Stadium of Harvard College, and there she had shivered with cold and excitement for two hours, while Henry Hewitt, a splendid young giant in very dirty clothes and a queer helmet, led his team to victory against Yale. She remembered the frenzy and hysteria of cheers as the great audience rose to shout his name, and she loved him then for looking so stern and indifferent to it all. After this she heard him discussed in the

family circle of which he was a member several times removed. She heard how modest he was, and shy, and almost ferocious if praised. She heard how the men of his team adored him, and how he had abstained from certain mysterious things of which drinking and smoking seemed the least ― in order that his men might abstain also, and be fit for conquest.

The glory of all this still surrounded him, though it had happened nearly ten years ago and he was now working in a bank. Splendid he still seemed, powerful and lean of body, with a fine face of stern lines, and a boyish smile. Speaking little, his reticence suggested concealed strength. It could be felt that he was modest, straight, and simple. He liked country life, and could relax into golf or idle drifting in a boat while he lounged and whistled absentmindedly or laughed at transparent jokes.

Birth had placed him among the finan