She passed on to the door of Prue. Prue was the second daughter. Rosie, the eldest, had married Tom Milford and moved away. She was having troubles of her own, and children with a regularity that led Serina to dislike Tom Milford more than ever. Serina knocked several times at Prue's door without response. Then she went in as she always had to. Prue was still asleep, and her yesterday's clothes seemed to be asleep, too, in all sorts of attitudes and all sorts of places. The only regularity about the room was the fact that every single thing was out of place. The dressing-table held a little chaos, including one stocking. The other stocking was on the floor. One silken garter glowed in the southeast corner and one in the northwest. One shoe reclined in the southwest corner and the other gaped in the northeast. But they were pretty shoes. Her frock was in a heap, but it suggested a heap of flowers. Hair-ribbons and ribboned things and a crumpled sash bedecked the carpet. But the prettiest thing of all was the head half fallen from the pillow and half smothered in the tangled skeins of hair. One arm was bent back over her brow to shut out the sunlight and the other arm dangled to the floor. There was something adorable about the round chin nestling in the soft throat. Her chin seemed to frown with a lovable sullenness. There was a mysterious grace in the very sprawl vaguely outlined by the long wrinkles and ridges of the blankets. Serina shook her head over Prue in a loving despair. She was the bad boy of the family, impatient, exacting, hot-tempered, stormy, luxurious, yet never monotonous. "You can always put your hand on Ollie," Serina would say; "but you never know where Prue is from one minute to the next." Consequently Ollie was not interesting and Prue was. They were all afraid of Prue and afraid for her. They all toadied to her and she kept them excited--alarmed, perhaps; angry, oh yes; but never bored. And there were rewards in her service, too, for she could be as stormy with affection as with mutiny. Sometimes she would attack Serina with such gusts of gratitude or admiration that her mother would cry for help. She would squeeze her father's ribs till he gasped for breath. When she was pleased she would dance about the house like a whirling maenad with ululations of ecstasy. These crises were sharp, but they left a sweet taste in the memory. So Prue had the best clothes and did the least work. Prue was sent off to boarding-school in Chicago, though she had never been able to keep up with her classes in Carthage; while Ollie--who took first prizes till even the goody-goody boys hated her--stayed at home. She had dreamed of being a teacher in the High, but she never mentioned it, and she studied bookkeeping and stenography in the business college so that she could help her father.