Cathy, left to herself, and without the stimulating influence of her friends, decided with placid regret that there was no way to improve her existence; she felt like the man who tried to lift himself over the fence by pulling at his boot-straps. Bert shut herself up and wrestled with a long column of very symmetrical figures. The result of the addition seemed to dismay her. She clutched her bang with one hand, while she carefully went over the list again. Bert had lain awake hours and hours the night before, rehearsing the various parts she might assume as a lady-like peddler of different wares to a paying public; but she surveyed her small pack of accomplishments with the sad conviction that she “hadn’t a faculty that anybody would give two cents for.” “If some one would kindly hire me to read all the new novels, or should desire my services as assistant hostess at endless dinners and luncheons, I think I might command quite a salary,” sighed she, knowing well her own self-poise and general success in those unremunerative employments. “Or, there is my other little stock-in-trade,” she continued with disconsolate amusement—“writing letters! I do think I can write a letter.” And she could, because she always wrote with the keen mental enjoyment of exercising her own fluent powers of expression. “But,” she reflected, “who is going to pay my dress-maker for the intense pleasure of being allowed to receive my epistles? No, letter-writing hasn’t any market value—But—but _hasn’t_ it?” Ah, now she was really thinking! For she sat motionless, with raised eyebrows and parted lips; then she started to her feet, walked excitedly up and down her room a few times, surveyed herself in the glass, and laughed and chuckled in a mysterious way as she put on her overshoes and hoisted her umbrella. Mr. Mitchell was a very busy man—too busy to know his daughter very well; and, as is far too common with busy men, he regarded a girl as an entirely useless, rather expensive but withal pleasant factor of his establishment. So, as may be imagined, he was somewhat surprised as he sat in his private office on that particular drizzly day, hurriedly writing a business letter, when Bert, bright and emphatic, suddenly appeared. Her father, without stopping his rapid pen, looked up, between sentences, long enough to say with good-natured bewilderment, “Why, Bert, what has brought you _here_? Do you need some more money?” Bert flushed at that question. Some thoughts with which she had been exercising her mind had made it a trifle sore; and in the mood occasioned by those thoughts, her father’s evident surprise at her appearance, his slight emphasis on “here,” and his seemingly natural conclusion as to the cause of the phenomenon, rather hurt her feelings. “Money?” she said, with some heat, “No, sir! Do you regard me as only a creature with an all-devouring greed for gold?”