Miss Samantha, although but seventeen, had for some time been tacitly recognized as the natural leader of the family. She did no work either in factory or on farm, and the local imagination did not easily conceive a condition of things in which she could find herself reduced to the strait of manual labor. Her method, baldly stated, was to levy more or less reluctant contributions upon whatever the rest of the family brought in. There was a fiction abroad that Samantha stayed at home to help her mother. The facts were that she was only visible at the Law-ton domicile at meal-times and during inclement weather, and that her mother was rather pleased than otherwise at this being the case. Samantha was of small and slight figure, with a shrewd, prematurely-sapient face that was interesting rather than pretty, and with an eye which, when it was not all demure innocence, twinkled coldly like that of a rodent of prey. She had several qualities of mind and deportment which marked her as distinct from the mass of village girls; that which was most noticeable, perhaps, was her ability to invent and say sharp, comical, and cuttingly sarcastic things without herself laughing at them. This was felt to be a rare attainment indeed in Thessaly, and its possession gave her much prestige among the young people of both sexes, who were conscious of an insufficient command alike over their tongues and their boisterous tendencies. Samantha could have counted her friends, in the true, human sense of the word, upon her thumbs; but of admirers and toadies she swayed a regiment. Her own elder sisters, Melissa and Lucinda, alternated between sulky fear of her and clumsy efforts at propitiation; the junior twins had never as yet emerged from a plastic state of subordination akin to reverence. Samantha’s attitude toward them all was one of lofty yet observant criticism, relieved by lapses into half-satirical, half-jocose amiability as their pay-days approached. On infrequent occasions she developed a certain softness of demeanor toward her father, but to her mother she had been uniformly and contemptuously uncivil for years.