"Do you remember Gerty Harrow with whom we were at school?" wrote Laura Mason to an old friend. "She lives here, near the place of my brother-in-law, and is now about twenty-two years of age. Such a nice girl--pretty and clever, and engaged to a most amusing American called Luther Tracey. He manufactures motor-cars, and Gerty Baldwin drives them. Whenever a car is sold, Gerty goes down and stops for a week or so with the people who buy it, to show them how it works. Being pretty she gets plenty to do. Mrs. Baldwin objected to Gerty doing this for a livelihood, and only consented when Gerty agreed to drop her father's name. She is Miss Baldwin now, and I like her more than ever. The mother----" Here followed several marks of exclamation, as though Laura's powers of writing failed her, as they assuredly did. It would have taken the pen of Dickens to describe this lazy, self-indulgent, querulous woman, who lay on a sofa all day reading novels. At the present moment, she was deep in a _Family Herald_ story called "Only an Earl," in which a governess with a single rose in her hair marries, with great self-abnegation, a mere earl, after refusing two dukes and a foreign prince. Mrs. Baldwin, basking like a cat in the sunshine that poured through the window, read each page slowly, and ate a lump of Turkish delight every time she turned a page. The sitting-room was most untidy. Children's toys were strewn about; the carpet was raggedy the pictures hung askew, the red plush table-cloth--it was a most abominable covering--was stained, the blind was torn, and a broken window-pane had been filled up with brown paper. Yet the room had a comfortable, homely look, and if it had not been so disorderly, would have been pleasant to live in. But Mrs. Baldwin, quite undisturbed by the confusion, read on with great enjoyment. She only lifted her eyes when Laura Mason entered the room, and then her first words were querulous. "How you can bear to stop here with Getty when your own home is so beautiful, I really don't know," moaned Mrs. Baldwin, keeping her place in the tale by bending the book backward. "Just look at this room. I may toil from morning to night, and it never will look tidy." "It's comfortable, at all events," said Laura, sitting down. "Do you feel well this morning, Mrs. Baldwin." "Just alive. I could hardly get out of bed. Not a wink of sleep, and dreadful dreams." Mrs. Baldwin did not explain how she could dream without sleeping, but she was such a wonderful woman that she could do anything. For instance, she could be idle throughout the day, and keep up the fiction that she worked like a slave. She could enjoy her life in laziness and dirt and selfishness, posing as a martyr to every one. Laura saw through her as most people did; but as Laura was a guest, and Gerty's friend, she did not explain herself at length, as she would have liked to do. Besides, Mrs. Baldwin was a good-natured old dormouse, and no one could be angry with her long.