What it was she could scarcely define, save that there were now long lines on her cheek where once there had been curves, that her eyes were perhaps less bright, that gray hairs had begun to appear, and that certainly she had less color than formerly. All these changes had not come in a day, and yet in a day, in an hour, Miss Theodora realized them. As she looked in the mirror and saw that her gray hairs were still few enough to count, she glanced below the glass to the little faded photograph on the table. John had passed into the land of perpetual youth, and William, that other, had he begun to show the marks of age? Thus she wondered as she gazed at the young man with the longish, thick hair, at which Ernest had sometimes laughed. But she seldom let her mind wander in this direction, and she turned it now toward other friends of her girlhood, of whom some occasionally flitted across her vision. The most of those who had been her contemporaries the winter she came out were now married. Of these, she could not recall one who had not "married well," as the phrase is. Were they growing old more gracefully than she? Would she change places with any one of those portly matrons, absorbed now in family or social interests? The sphere of the unmarried few was unattractive to her. The causes, whether literary or philanthropic, into which the majority threw themselves had certainly no charm for her. She could not have worked for the Indians after the manner of her cousin Sarah Somerset. To her the Indian race seemed too cruel for the enthusiasm lavished on it by a certain group of Boston women. When her father had verged toward Transcendentalism she had lagged behind, and more modern "isms" were even farther out of her reach. She listened dubiously to rhapsodies by one of her cousins on the immense spiritual value of the Vedas. Woman suffrage! Well, she had only one friend who waxed eloquent over this, and Miss Theodora, although on the whole liberal-minded, was repelled from a study of the question by the peculiarities of dress and manner affected by some of its devotees. Even Culture itself, with a capital letter, and all that this implies could never have been a fad of hers. The books people talked about now were so different from those that she had been accustomed to; she knew nothing about modern French literature, and her friends cared nothing for Miss Ferrier or Crabbe. After all, Miss Theodora would not have changed places with one of these friends of her youth, married or unmarried, with their tablets covered with social engagements or note-books crammed with appointments for meetings or lectures. She found her own life sufficiently full.