"It's vurry nice! I don't see a mite of use in being young if you ken't have some fun. You grow old fast enough, and then there's nothing else to it but to sit round and preach. Your mother and Aunt Soph have just _got_ to preach, but I wouldn't start yet awhile if I were you. You'd be just the prettiest thing that was ever seen if you knew how to fix yourself up, but you _don't_, and you seem to me to mope along the whole blessed time, without a bit of fun to perk you up. Say! don't you feel a bit tired of it sometimes? Don't you ever have a kind of feeling that you want to _do_ something for a change?" "Sometimes! Do I ever!" Elma echoed the words with startling emphasis. "Always, always! It is here,"--she pressed her hands on her breast--"stifled up here all the time--a horrible, rebellious longing to get out; to be free, to do--I don't know what--really I don't--but something _different_! I've lived in Norton all my life, and hardly ever been away. Mother hates travelling in winter, and in the summer she hates to leave the garden, and I'm so strong that I don't need change. I never went to school like other girls. Mother disapproves of school influences, so I had governesses instead. It's awful to have a resident teacher in the house, and be an only pupil; you feel governessed out of your life. And now I have no friends to visit, or to visit me, only the Norton girls, for whom I don't care. It seems ungrateful when I have so much to be thankful for, but I feel _pent_! Sometimes I get such a wicked feeling that I just long to snap and snarl at everybody. I'm ashamed all the time, and can _see_ how horrid I am, but--" She broke off, sighing deeply, and Cornelia crouched forward, clasping her knees as before, and bending her chin to meet them, her eyes ashine with eagerness and curiosity. "Yes, I know; I've been there myself. I was there this morning after just two weeks. I don't begin to have your endoorance, my dear, but you take a straight tip from me. When you feel the symptoms coming on, don't you go trying to be sweet and forbearing, and bottling up all the froth; it's not a mite of use, for it's bound to rise to the top, and keeping don't improve it. Just let yourself go, and be right-down ugly to _somebody_--anyone will do, the first that comes handy--and you'll feel a heap better!" She sighed, and turned a roguish glance towards the shrouded windows of The Nook. "I was ugly to Aunt Soph before I came out!" Already Elma had mastered the subtleties of Americanese sufficiently to understand that the terms "lovely" and "ugly" had no bearing on outward appearance, but were descriptive of character only. Her eyes widened, partly in horrified surprise at listening to a doctrine so diametrically opposed to everything which she had previously heard, and partly in pure, unadulterated curiosity to know the cause of the rebellion.