the idea! Did she want me to dress like a little frump of a country
girl? It seems she did.

Poor mother! Dear mother! I wonder how she kept her patience at all.
But she kept it. I remember that distinctly, too.

It was that winter that I went through the morbid period. Like our
childhood's measles and whooping cough, it seems to come to most of
us--us women children. I wonder why? Certainly it came to me. True to
type I cried by the hour over fancied slights from my schoolmates, and
brooded days at a time because Father or Mother "didn't understand," I
questioned everything in the earth beneath and the heavens above;
and in my dark despair over an averted glance from my most intimate
friend, I meditated on whether life was, or was not, worth the living,
with a preponderance toward the latter.

Being plunged into a state of settled gloom, I then became acutely
anxious as to my soul's salvation, and feverishly pursued every ism
and ology that caught my roving eye's attention, until in one short
month I had become, in despairing rotation, an incipient agnostic,
atheist, pantheist, and monist. Meanwhile I read Ibsen, and wisely
discussed the new school of domestic relationships.

Mother--dear mother!--looked on aghast. She feared, I think, for my
life; certainly for my sanity and morals.

It was Father this time who came to the rescue. He pooh-poohed
Mother's fears; said it was indigestion that ailed me, or that I was
growing too fast; or perhaps I didn't get enough sleep, or needed,
maybe, a good tonic. He took me out of school, and made it a point to