"Lillie is eighteen this winter, you know," was my gentle friend's reply. "Who would have thought time could have flown around so quickly. Mr. Mason is very anxious she should make her _entree_ this season. You can scarcely fancy how disagreeable it is to me, but I must not be selfish. I cannot always have her with me." "And you, like a good mother," I said, "will throw aside your love for retirement and accompany her?" "Certainly," replied Agnes eagerly, and she added with a slight expression of feeling which I well understood--"I will watch over her, for she will need my careful love now even more than in childhood." "Where is the pretty cause of all this anxiety and attention?" I inquired. "Charlie would not dress for his morning walk," answered the mother, "unless sister Lillie assisted in the robing of the young tyrant, so she is in the nursery." We inspected the different robes and gay things spread out so temptingly before us, and grew femininely eloquent over these beautiful trifles, and were most earnestly engaged in admiring the _parure_ of brilliant diamonds, and the spotless pearls, with which the fond, proud father and husband had presented them that morning, when a slight tap was heard at the door, and our pet Lillie entered. A bright-eyed, light-hearted creature is Lillie Mason--a sunbeam to her home. She ran up to me with affectionate greetings, and united in our raptures over the glittering _bijouterie_. "How will you like this new life, Lillie?" I asked, as the lovely girl threw herself on a low _marchepied_ at our feet, as if wearied of the pretty things. "I can scarcely tell," she replied, and she rested her head on her mother's lap, whose hand parted the clustering ringlets on the fair, smooth brow, while Lillie's eyes looked up most lovingly to that beloved mother, as she added--"How we shall miss the quiet reading hours, mother, darling. What time shall we have during our robing and unrobing for 'the _gentle Una and her milk-white lamb_,' and '_those bright children of the bard, Imogen, the fair Fidele and lovely Desdemona_?' What use is there in all this decking and adorning? Life is far happier spent in one's own home." "I fear," said Agnes, as she fondly caressed her daughter, "that I have made my Lillie too much of a household darling; but I have done it to avoid a greater evil. We women must love something--such a wealth of affection is stored within our hearts, that we are rendered miserable if it is poured out upon one human being, after being pent up within bounds, during childhood and girlhood up to womanhood. Should my Lillie be unfortunate in her love--I mean her wedded love--the misery will not be half so intense, for her heart belongs, at least two-thirds, to her family and mother, and no faithless lover can ever boast the possession of the whole of it."