"You call me brave, do you?" she said. "Dick Crawford, if I was not a little ashamed of you for allowing yourself to have these fits of low spirits, I would tell you something to prove how 'brave' I am! Well, I _will_ tell you, because I know that it is exceedingly improper and I ought not to do so. Two or three weeks ago, spending an evening at Mrs. R----'s, her daughters showed me a suit of clothes belonging to a stripling brother, just gone away to the war. One of them bantered me to put on the suit and go down-stairs among the gentlemen. I thought it would be a good joke, and I tried it. The girls said that I made a very handsome boy--hem! and I suppose that I did. At all events, I went down-stairs and opened the parlor-door, bold as a sheep, when--what do you think happened? Why, I thought, all at once, that all the clothes were sticking tight to my limbs; and when one of the gentlemen came towards me, I grabbed the cloth from the centre-table for a cloak, and played hob with some Bohemian glassware and a few Parisian ornaments, finishing by skedaddling up-stairs a good deal more rapidly than I came down. Was not _there_ 'courage' for you?" "No want of it, certainly," said Crawford, who had been laughing a little, spite of his low spirits, at the naivete of the relation. "It was modesty and not want of personal courage that drove you out of that very funny position." "Think so?" said the wild girl. "Then as I _am_ a coward and mean to be known for what I am, I must tell you another story. A few weeks ago I went into a menagerie, and one of the lions made a rush at the bars of his cage--probably because he saw _me_. There was about as much danger of his getting out, I suppose, as there would have been of _my_ doing so in the same circumstances; but of course I made a fool of myself, got frightened, yelled, and had all the visitors in the menagerie looking at me. How was _that_? No want of courage? Eh?" "That," said Richard Crawford, sententiously, "that was the _woman_." "Humph!" said Joe, as she once more assisted the invalid to dispose himself comfortably on his usual couch. "Now you will not agree to my estimate of _myself_, perhaps you will think better of my estimate of _you_." "Perhaps so," said Crawford. "Try me." "Well, then, I have been watching you half the afternoon, and I have made up my mind about you more nearly than ever before." "And what am I?" asked Crawford, with just a dash of impatience in his tone. "A hypochondriac!" said Joe. "You are a little sick, and you think yourself much worse. You look better and feel better within the last hour--" "Eh, what?" said the invalid, startled apparently by some sudden thought connected with the words.