Isolde hadn't included Vicky, but then Vicky _couldn't_ want anything. She wasn't afraid to fly in the faces of the Trustees and the whole League and they wouldn't mind if she did. She was as clever as she was pretty. She could take the old dresses which Mrs. Custer and Mrs. White, the Trustees' wives, and Mrs. Deering whom Isolde had visited in Chicago, and Godmother Jocelyn sent every now and then and make the stunningest new dresses. And once an artist from New York had painted her portrait and exhibited it in Paris and had won a medal for it. The League ladies approved of that and always told of it. Vicky had whole processions of beaux who came and crowded in the chairs in the front room or sat on the broad window sills of the open windows smoking while she talked to them or played for them. Isolde's few beaux were not noisy and jolly like Vick's--they all looked as though the League might have picked them out from some assortment. They usually read to Isolde verses of their own or made her read them some of Dad's. Maybe, Sidney's thoughts shot out at a new angle--maybe Isolde did not like beaux who were poets, liked Vick's kind of men better. Trude had only one beau and Sidney had never seen him because Trude had had him when she was visiting Aunt Edith White. Trude and Isolde had whispered a great deal about him and Trude had let Isolde read his letters. Then a letter had come that had made Trude look all queer and white and Isolde, after she had read it, had gone to Trude and put her arms around her neck and Isolde only did a thing like that when something dreadful happened. Sidney had hoped that she might find the letter lying around somewhere so carelessly that she could be pardoned for reading it, but though she had looked everywhere she had never found it. She had had to piece together Trude's romance from the fabric of her agile imagination. Sidney had often tried to make herself hate the old house. Though it was a jolly, rambly place it was so very down-at-the heels and the light that poured in through the windows made things look even barer and shabbier. Nancy Stevens lived in one of the new bungalows near the school and it was beautiful with shiny furniture and rugs that felt like woolly bed slippers under one's tread and two pairs of curtains at each window and Nancy's own room was all pink even to the ruffled stuff hung over her bed like a tent. But Sidney had once heard Mrs. Milliken say to Isolde: "I hope, dear girl, that you will not be tempted to change this fine old house in _any_ way--to leave it just as your father lived in it is the greatest tribute we can pay to his memory." After that Sidney knew there was no use hinting for even _one_ pair of curtains. But her sisters had seemed quite contented.