"It's the same thing--I _feel_ grown--for the moment!" Elizabeth looked around again to see where Elsie was. "I'd like to ask you a question, Elizabeth." "I should be pleased to answer the question." "But father told me not to ask any questions: I was to wait till I got back home and ask _him_." "I think that is very strange! Aren't there questions a boy can't ask his father? A father wouldn't be the right one to answer. You must ask the one who can answer!" There was no reply. "Well," urged Elizabeth, feeling the time was short (there have been others!), "if you can't _ask_ it, _pop_ it! If you can't ask the question, pop the question." And then--clandestinely down behind the backs of the chairs! And not on the cheek! Exact style of the respondent not accurately known--probably early Elizabethan. * * * * * Toward the middle of the afternoon as they played further about the room in search of whatever entertainment it afforded, they stopped before an old cabinet with shelves arranged behind glass doors. On one of the upper shelves stood some little oval frames of blue or of rose-colored velvet; and in the frames were miniatures of women of old Southern days with bare ivory necks and shoulders and perhaps a big damask rose on the breast or pendent in a cataract of curls behind the ear: women who made you think what must have been the physical and mental calibre of the men who had captured them and held them captured: Elizabeth's grandmothers and aunts on the mother's side. The two girls, each with an arm around the other's waist and heads close together, peered through the glass doors at the vital dames. "Don't they look as though they liked to dance and to eat and to manage everything and everybody?" said Elsie, always practical. "Don't they look _proud_!" said Elizabeth proudly, "and _true_! and don't they look _alive_!" But she linked her arm in Elsie's and drew her away to something else, adding in delicate confidence: "I think I am glad, though, Elsie, that mamma does not look like _them_. There is no one in the world like mamma! I am a little like her, but I dwindled. Children _do_ dwindle nowadays, don't they?" "Not I," said Elsie. "I didn't dwindle. Do you notice any dwindling anywhere about me? Please say where." On the middle and lower shelves of the cabinet were some long-ago specimens of mounted wild duck; and on the moss-ragged boughs of an artificial oak some age-moulted passenger pigeons. The boys talked about these, and told stories of their grandfathers' hunting days when pigeons in multitudes flecked the morning sky on frosty mornings or had made blue feathery clouds about the oak trees in the vast Kentucky pastures.