"Thanks, Aunt Reely, yes, the curtains do need laundering." Sard was out of the room and down the stairs, the receiver at her ear. "Minga! you rascal! Well, I am glad! Why didn't you write me, you little trimmer----No, ma'am, I did not--did you? Was it nice? No, but I saw Cynthia and Gertrude, they're back, bobbed hair and golf-sticks, bloom of youth is their line this year. What are you laughing at? No--is he?--to Cora Bland? Wasn't that like Cora--she's going to finish? I wish I were--why? Oh, that'll keep! Well, Cora is a good all 'round sport, don't you think? She'll make Alpha, you see if she doesn't---- What? Oh, Minga, don't ring off! That's so, of course you have to pack; all right then--see you to-night--so glad you are coming, don't forget to sit on the right-hand side of the train coming up, the river's wonderful as you come over the hill. Bye-bye." Sard, smiling, hung up the receiver. Not until this, the first visit of a college pal since her mother's death, had she felt her hunger for real companionship. Now as she had done the first day she had left off her simple mourning, she looked up at the portrait of her mother hanging in the hall. She kissed her hand to that curly, ear-ringed little lady. "Dear little dead Mother," said Sard tenderly. "Dear little dead Mother!" Instinctively she thought about the mothers of the other girls of the town. Mrs. Bradon, Cynthia's mother, fat, stupid and conventional. Gertrude's mother, a hard practical woman with ambitions, the other mothers as Sard knew them seemed too girlish, crude, trivial, beside the little soft, curly, ear-ringed lady that Sard had only just begun to look at with woman eyes. "Would we have gotten on, Mother dear, would we?" whispered Sard, wistfully. "The other girls don't with their mothers." Often Sard had been troubled by the guilty feeling that had her mother lived--well, there might not have been so much comradeship between them. Sard, clad in her crisp, clean linen, with white low-cut shoes and the plain little pin at her trim collar, remembered with a sense of tender wonder all her mother's little fripperies and gewgaws, the chains, the laces, and little sets of jewelry and pins and dewdabs--how quickly two years of camp and college had taught one of how small account were these things!