the personal pronoun which I hate to remember even at this remote date, I screamed forth at the top of my lungs: 'I want--a pink sash!'" "And didn't you get it?" said Donas Guthrie. The young woman crooked one eyebrow rather comically. "N-o," she said, "I never got it!" "But you could get it any time now," argued the man. Helplessly she threw out the palms of her hands and the unexpected gesture displayed an amazing slimness and whiteness of wrist. "Stupid!" she laughed. "What would I do with a pink sash now?" Ruthlessly her quick eyes traveled down the full length of her scant, rough skirt to the stubbed toes of her battered brown riding boots. "Dust on the highway and chalk in the classroom and 'grown-up-ness' everywhere!" she persisted dully. "That's the real tragedy of growing up--not that we outgrow our original desires, but that retaining those desires, we outgrow the ability to find satisfaction in them. People ought to think of that, you know, when they thwart a child's ten-cent passion for a tin trumpet. Fifty years later, when that child is a bank president, it may drive him almost crazy to have a toy-shop with a whole window-full of tin trumpets come and cuddle right next door to his bank--and nothing that the man can do with them!" Like a little gray veil the tired look fell again over her face. The man saw it and shuddered. "Psychology is my subject at Varndon College, you know," she continued listlessly, "and so I suppose I'm rather specially interested in freakish mental things. Anyway--pink sashes or Noah's arks or enough sugar in your cocoa--I have a theory that no child ever does outgrow its ungratified legitimate desires; though subsequent maturity may bring him to the point where his original desire has reached such astounding proportions that the original object can no longer possibly appease it." Reminiscently, her narrowing eyes turned back their inner vision to the far-away grotesque incident of the camp meeting. "It isn't as though a child asked for a thing the very first time that he thought of it," she protested a trifle pathetically. "An idea has been sown and has grown and germinated in his mind a pretty long time before he gets up his courage to speak to anybody about it. Oh, I tell you, sir, the time to grant anybody a favor is the day the favor is asked, for that day is the one psychological moment of the world when supply and demand are keyed exactly to each other's limits, and can be mated beatifically to grow old, or die young, together. But after that day--!