restful, so calming to walk on dear nature's breast. Maudie Joyce and Mabel Blossom always know the minute an attack of artistic temperament begins in me. Then they go away quietly and reverently, and I write a story and feel better. So this time I am going to tell about Kittie James's sister Josephine. In the very beginning I must explain that Josephine James used to be a pupil at St. Catharine's herself, ages and ages ago, and finally she graduated and left, and began to go into society and look around and decide what her life-work should be. That was long, long before our time--as much as ten years, I should think, and poor Josephine must be twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old now. But Kittie says she is just as nice as she can be, and not a bit poky, and so active and interested in life you'd think she was young. Of course I know such things can be, for my own sister Grace, Mrs. George E. Verbeck, is perfectly lovely and the most popular woman in the society of our city. But Grace is married, and perhaps that makes a difference. It is said that love keeps the spirit young. However, perhaps I'd better go on about Josephine and not dwell on that. Experienced as we girls are, and drinking of life in deep draughts though we do, we still admit--Maudie, Mabel, and I--that we do not yet know much about love. But one cannot know everything at fifteen, and, as Mabel Blossom always says, "there is yet time." We all know just the kind of men they're going to be, though. Mine will be a brave young officer, of course, for a general's daughter should not marry out of the army, and he will die for his country, leaving me with a broken heart. Maudie Joyce says hers must be a man who will rule her with a rod of iron and break her will and win her respect, and then be gentle and loving and tender. And Mabel Blossom says she's perfectly sure hers will be fat and have a blond mustache and laugh a great deal. Once she said maybe none of us would ever get _any_; but the look Maudie Joyce and I turned upon her checked her thoughtless words. Life is bitter enough as it is without thinking of dreadful things in the future. I sometimes fear that underneath her girlish gayety Mabel Blossom conceals a morbid nature. But I am forgetting Josephine James. This story will tell why, with all her advantages of wealth and education and beauty, she remained a maiden lady till she was twenty-eight; and she might have kept on, too, if Kittie had not taken matters in hand and settled them for her.