“Nonsense, Nance, I am exactly the same. I don’t kick off my pumps because I might have a hole in the toe of my stocking, and I don’t lie down when I sit down because of my good tailored skirt. You are just fancying things. I am the same old kid. It is thanks to Judy that I have the tailor-made dress and the other things that make me feel grown-up. You see, my family have always had an idea that I did not care for clothes just because I wore the old ones without complaining. One day Kent spoke of my indifference to clothes to Judy, and she fired up and told him I did love clothes and would like to have pretty ones more than any girl she knew of; that I pretended to be indifferent just to carry off the old ones with grace. Kent was very much astonished and the dear boy insisted on my going into Louisville before Judy left and having a good tailor make me two dresses, this blue one for every day and my lovely best gray. I was so afraid of hurting Miss Lizzie Monday’s feelings (she is the little old seamstress who has made my clothes ever since I was born); but Kent fixed that up by going to see Miss Lizzie himself, asking her advice and requesting her company into Louisville, where we did the shopping and interviewed the tailor, had lunch at the Watterson and took in a show in the afternoon. Miss Lizzie had the time of her life and was as much pleased over my having some good clothes as I am myself. Dear old Kent had to draw on his savings that he is putting by with a view to taking a finishing course on architecture, but mother says she is going to reimburse him just as soon as there is a settlement made for the oil lands we are selling.” “Do you know, Molly, when I got your letter telling me about Mr. Kean’s nosing out oil on your place, I was so happy and excited that I began to cry and got my nose so red I had to skip a lecture at Chautauqua, which shocked my mother greatly. To think of your dear mother having an income that will make her comfortable and independent!” “Mother does not seem to be greatly elated over it. She is very glad to pay off the mortgage on Chatsworth; relieved that we shall not have to sell our beautiful beech woods; but money means less to my mother than any one in the world, I do believe. Why, talking about my being a kid, I was born more grown-up than my mother, in some ways. It’s the Irish in her. The Irish are all children.” Molly had very cleverly got Nance off of the subject of there being a change in her, but Nance was right. Molly was older, and she felt it herself. The summer had been an eventful one for her and had left her older and wiser. Mildred’s marriage; Jimmy Lufton’s proposal, or near proposal; the family’s change of fortune; Professor Green’s evident preference for her society; all these things had combined to sober her in a way.