"No," said I, laughing. "Don't you know that the afflatus always exhausts
the priestess? You may tell Letty's fortune, or mine, if you will; but my
power is gone."

"I can tell yours easily, O Sibyl!" replied she. "You will never marry,
neither for real nor ideal. You should have fallen in love in the orthodox
way, when you were seventeen. You are adaptive enough to have moulded
yourself into any nature that you loved, and constant enough to have clung
to it through good and evil. You would have been a model wife, and a
blessed mother. But now--you are too old, my dear; you have seen too
much; you have not hardened yourself, but you have learned to see too
keenly into other people. You don't respect men, 'except exceptions'; and
you have seen so much matrimony that is harsh and unlovable, that you
dread it; and yet--Don't look at me that way, Sarah! I shall cry!--My
dear! my darling! I did not mean to hurt you.--I am a perfect fool!--Do
please look at me with your old sweet eyes again!--How could I!"----

"Look at Letty," said I, succeeding at last in a laugh. And really Letty
was comical to look at; she was regarding Josephine and me with her eyes
wide open like two blue larkspur flowers, her little red lips apart, and
her whole pretty surface face quite full of astonishment.

"Wasn't that a nice little tableau, Letty?" said Josephine, with
preternatural coolness. "You looked so sleepy, I thought I'd wake you up
with a bit of a scene from 'Lara Aboukir, the Pirate Chief'; you know we
have a great deal of private theatricals at Baltimore; you should see me
in that play as Flashmoria, the Bandit's Bride."

Letty rubbed her left eye a little, as if to see whether she was sleepy or
not, and looked grave; for me, the laugh came easily enough now. Jo saw