Presently she shook off her dreams and returned to the scarcely less thrilling periodical which had evoked them. Here was another photograph--though not nearly so alluring as that of the Lady Sylvia; a woman who had become an authoritative expounder of political and national issues--politics again! Missy proceeded to read, but her full interest wasn't deflected till her eyes came to some thought-compelling words: “It was while yet a girl in her teens, in a little Western town (“Oh!” thought Missy), that Miss Carson mounted the first rung of the ladder she has climbed to such enviable heights. She had just graduated from the local high school (“Oh! oh!” thought Missy) and, already prodded by ambition, persuaded the editor of the weekly paper to give her a job...” Once again Missy's eyes wandered dreamily out over the yard... Presently a voice was wafted out from the sideporch: “Missy!--oh, Missy! Where are you?” There was mother calling--bother! Missy picked up the Ladies' Home Messenger and trudged back to bondage. “What in the world do you mean, Missy? You could write your name all over the parlour furniture for dust! And then those stockings--” Missy dutifully set about her tasks. Yet, ah! it certainly is hard to dust and darn while one's soul is seething within one, straining to fly out on some really high enterprise of life. However one can, if one's soul strains hard enough, dust and dream; darn and dream. Especially if one has a helpful lilt, rhythmic to dust-cloth's stroke or needle's swing, throbbing like a strain of music through one's head: Cosmos--Cosmos!--Cosmos--Cosmos! Missy was absent-eyed at the midday dinner, but no sooner was the meal over before she feverishly attacked the darning-basket again. Her energy may have been explained when, as soon as the stockings were done, she asked her mother if she might go down to the Library. Mother and Aunt Nettie from their rocking-chairs on the side-porch watched the slim figure in its stiffly-starched white duck skirt and shirt-waist disappear down shady Locust Avenue. “I wonder what Missy's up to, now?” observed Aunt Nettie. “Up to?” murmured Mrs. Merriam. “Yes. She hardly touched her chop at dinner and she's crazy about lamb chops. She's eaten almost nothing for days. And either shirking her work, else going at it in a perfect frenzy!” “Growing girls get that way sometimes,” commented Missy's mother gently. (Could Missy have heard and interpreted that tone, she might have been less hard on grown-ups who “don't understand.”) “Missy's seventeen, you know.” “H'm!” commented Aunt Nettie, as if to say, “What's THAT to do with it?” Somehow it seems more difficult for spinsters than for mothers to remember those swift, free flights of madness and sweetness which, like a troop of birds in the measurable heavens, sweep in joyous circles across the sky of youth.