“I want your brothers to be what they call ‘knocked silly’ when they first see you, Hildegarde. You must be all dressed and ready, and we can turn up the bottom of the skirt and work at that last dragon while we’re waiting.” In pursuance of this plan, the two girls had gone up-stairs directly after supper, though it was hardly probable the boys could get there before half-past nine. Mrs. Mar sat waiting for them in the parlor, on that side of the center table where the book rest supported an open volume. She rocked while she waited, and she crocheted while she rocked. At times she glanced at the clock—not once at the open book. Not for her own edification was the volume there, but for the enlargement of Hildegarde’s literary horizon, while she and Bella stitched at silver dragons. But this latest choice in standard works had not pleased any one. Victor Hugo was much too fond of fiery love-scenes to prosper with Mrs. Mar, but the miserable man had become a classic, and after all, Hildegarde was old enough not to be infected. Bella—she read everything, the minx! Although Hildegarde was in her twenty-fifth year, Mrs. Mar knew her so little, she felt no assurance that the girl would keep up her languages, or read “the best things” in any tongue, without her mother’s dragging her by main force across the flowery fields of belles lettres—as though over stubble and through brake. Listening to Mrs. Mar’s reading of a classic was an experience of some singularity. For if she macerated descriptive bits with a chin-chopper despatch, to get them out of the way (not disguising the fact that she considered these passages in the light of the salutary self-torture that no disciplined life should evade, any more than vaccination or a visit to the dentist), she did far deadlier things to scenes of sentiment or passion. These she approached with a sturdy determination not to give in to their nonsense, to make them at all events _sound_ like sanity by sheer force of her own impregnable common-sense—a force so little to be withstood, that it could purge the most poetic page ever written. It made even Victor Hugo sound as reasonable as the washing list. If you didn’t inwardly curse or secretly weep, you must have laughed to see how effectually she could clip fancy’s wings, slam the door on sentiment, bring high passion down to a sneaking shame, and effectually punish a great reputation. In short, listening to Mrs. Mar reading romance was so sure a way, not only to strip it bare of its traditional glory, but to rob it of every chance of “going home,” that Hildegarde, as soon as she got wind of what was the next work to be attacked, hastened to borrow it of Bella, devoured it alone, and so got a first impression that could more or less hold its own against the maternal onslaught. It is but fair to say that to any comedy passage Mrs. Mar gave excellent effect, and, by way of appreciation, a grim smile peculiarly her own; while for