He went forward resolutely, saying “Hi! Stand still, there!” as he took hold of the calf. His wife stood back watching him and saying nothing. The calf turned, bolted a little way, and then let him take hold of it again. It did not seem to know whether to be afraid of him or not. Its eyes looked up into his. In the large eyes of dark mute brown and the smaller eyes of light blue there was much the same reluctant bewilderment in some far depths. But the man knew what he was after, and the calf did not know what was to come. “Come on here!” Mr. Sieverson said sharply. He put the rope around the calf’s neck. SHADES OF GEORGE SAND! BY ELLEN DU POIS TAYLOR From _Harper’s_ It was one of those April mornings when the sun lacquers yesterday’s rain puddles with gold, and the meadow larks melodiously promise a month of blue weather with violets to match it. But all this fruitful fuss did not warm one apathetic drop of Matilda Gessler’s young blood nor soften one scornful angle of her averted face. Matilda was weighing sugar in her father’s dingy little grocery in Crittenden, South Dakota, when she should have been dozing under ancestral lace in a château somewhere in France. If Mathilde Lantier, her paternal grandmother, hadn’t lived with such unwise intensity that one moonlit hour in a certain French garden, and if old Franz Gessler hadn’t been so conveniently eager to shoulder the consequences, and if ... but then Matilda knew nothing of all this. But she knew enough. She knew what her mother’s Methodist God had done to her. He had created her under a morally tight roof in Crittenden for the good of her soul when every Latin molecule of her belonged in one of those sophisticated centres of the earth where it’s dinner in low-cut brocade at eight and philosophy before kissing. And so Matilda, weighing sugar, sniffed at the plucky April trying to make a bright island on the muddy floor. What was the use of looking like a bayadere when it meant breaking her lithe back over flour bags, the contents of which were destined to nourish the grace of girls less graceful than she? She was doomed to make beans into bundles that others might be strengthened for flight. Only last week Hazel Amberton, the thick-ankled daughter of the jeweller, packed her gauzy traps and went forth to conquer Minneapolis. Matilda shrugged her shoulders. It was a gesture inherited from Mathilde Lantier and worthy of Ninon de Lenclos herself, but there was no one to appreciate it except three tobacco-sodden farmers who tramped out, leaving her to resume her futile musing. If ancestors would only stay where they belonged and live their lives in straight lines and leave the tangents to those who deserved them! Well, no good rebelling against anything as irrevocable as your grandmother’s mistakes, your father’s failures, or your mother’s God. That left one thing to rebel against ... the store.