But, after all, did they want a beauty in the family? On theory, no: the few beauties Mrs. Valentin had known in her life had not been the happiest of women. What they did want was an Elsie--their own Elsie--perfectly trained without losing her naturalness, perfectly educated without losing her health, perfectly dressed without thinking of clothes, perfectly accomplished without wasting her time, and, finally, an Elsie perfectly happy. All that parents, situated on the wrong side of the continent for art and culture, and not over-burdened with money, could do to that end, Mrs. Valentin was resolved should be done. Needless to say, very little was to be left to God. Mrs. Valentin was born in the East, some forty-odd years before this educational pilgrimage began, of good Unitarian stock,--born with a great sense of personal accountability. She could not have thrown it off and been joyful in the words, "It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves." Elsie had got a headache from the early start and the suppressed agitation of parting from her home and her father. Suppression was as natural to her as expression was to her mother. The father and daughter had held each other silently a moment; both had smiled, and both were ill for hours afterward. But Mrs. Valentin thought that in Elsie's case it was because she had not sent the girl to bed earlier the night before, and insisted on her eating something at breakfast. Herself--she had lain sleepless for the greater part of that night and many nights previous. She had anticipated in its difficulties every stage of the getting off, the subsequent journey, the arrival, their reception by Eastern relatives not seen for years, the introduction of her grown-up daughter, the impression she would make, the beginning of life all over again in a strange city. (She had known her Boston once, but that was twenty years ago.) She foresaw the mistakes she would inevitably make in her choice of means to the desired ends--dressmakers, doctors, specialists of all sorts; the horrible way in which school expenses mount up; the trivial yet poignant comparisons of school life, from which, if Elsie suffered, she would be sure to suffer in silence. After this fatiguing mental rehearsal she had risen at six, while the electric lights were still burning and the city was cloaked in fog. It was San Francisco of a midsummer morning; fog whistles groaning, sidewalks slippery with wet, and the gray-green trees and tinted flower-beds of the city gardens emerging like the first broad washes of a water-color laid in with a full brush.