“I was just wondering--” then she broke off. “Yes, dear,” encouraged mother. Missy's hazy thoughts took a sudden plunge, direct and startling. “I was wondering if, maybe, you'd give me an old pair of father's trousers.” “What on earth for, child?” “Just an old pair,” Missy went on, ignoring the question. “Maybe that pepper-and-salt pair you said you'd have to give to Jeff.” “But what do you want of them?” persisted mother. “Jeff needs them disgracefully--the last time he mowed the yard I blushed every time he turned his back toward the street.” “I think Mrs. Allen's going to give him a pair of Mr. Allen's--Kitty said she was. So he won't need the pepper-and-salts.” “But what do you want with a pair of PANTS?” Aunt Nettie put in. Missy wished Aunt Nettie had been invited out to supper; Aunt Nettie was relentlessly inquisitive. She knew she must give some kind of answer. “Oh, just for some fancy-work,” she said. She tried to make her tone insouciant, but she was conscious of her cheeks getting hot. “Fancy-work--pants for fancy-work! For heaven's sake!” ejaculated Aunt Nettie. Mother, also, was staring at her in surprise. But father, who was a darling, put in: “Give 'em to her if she wants 'em, dear. Maybe she'll make a lambrequin for the piano or an embroidered smoking-jacket for the old man--a'la your Ladies' Home Companion.” He grinned at her, but Missy didn't mind father's jokes at her expense so much as most grown-ups'. Besides she was grateful to him for diverting attention from her secret purpose for the pants. After supper, out in the summerhouse, it was an evening of such swooning beauty she almost forgot the bothers vexing her life. When you sit and watch the sun set in a bed of pastel glory, and let the level bars of thick gold light steal across the soft slick grass to reach to your very soul, and smell the heavenly sweetness of dew-damp roses, and listen to the shrill yet mournful even-song of the locusts--when you sit very still, just letting it all seep into you and through and through you, such a beatific sense of peace surges over you that, gradually, trivial things like athletic shortcomings seem superficial and remote. Later, too, up in her room, slowly undressing in the moonlight, she let herself yield to the sweeter spell. She loved her room, especially when but dimly lit by soft white strips of the moon through the window. She loved the dotted Swiss curtains blowing, and the white-valanced little bed, and the white-valanced little dressing-table all dim and misty save where a broad shaft of light gave a divine patch of illumination to undress by. She said her prayers on her knees by the window, where she could keep open but unsacrilegious eyes on God's handiwork outside--the divine miracle of everyday things transformed into shimmering glory. A soft brushing against her ankles told her that Poppylinda, her cat, had come to say good night. She lifted her pet up to the sill.