could draw him a picture to copy. Your Uncle David, you know, is an artist of a sort.”

For the first time since their incongruous association began the child met his smile; her face relaxed ever so little, and the lips quivered, but she smiled a shy, little dawning smile. There was trust in it and confidence. David put out his hand to pat hers, but thought better of it.

“Eleanor,” he said, “my mother knows our only living Ex-president, and the Countess of Warwick, one Vanderbilt, two Astors, and she’s met Sir Gilbert Parker, and Rudyard Kipling. She also knows many of the stars and satellites of upper Fifth Avenue. She has, as well, family connections of so 13 much weight and stolidity that their very approach, singly or in conjunction, shakes the earth underneath them.—I wish we could meet them all, Eleanor, every blessed one of them.”

“I wonder how a place like this apartment will look to her,” Beulah said thoughtfully. “I wonder if it will seem elegant, or cramped to death. I wonder if she will take to it kindly, or with an ill concealed contempt for its limitations.”

“The poor little thing will probably be so frightened and homesick by the time David gets her here, that she won’t know what kind of a place she’s arrived at,” Gertrude suggested. “Oh, I wouldn’t be in your shoes for the next few days for anything in the world, Beulah Page; would you, Margaret?”

The third girl in the group smiled.

“I don’t know,” she said thoughtfully. “It would be rather fun to begin it.”

“I’d rather have her for the first two months, and get it over with,” Beulah said decisively. “It’ll be hanging over your head long after my ordeal is over, and by the time I have to have her again she’ll be absolutely in training. You don’t come until the fifth on the list you know, Gertrude. Jimmie has her after me, then Margaret, then Peter, and you, 15 and David, if he has got up the courage to tell his mother by that time.”

“But if he hasn’t,” Gertrude suggested.

“He can work it out for himself. He’s got to take the child two months like the rest of us. He’s agreed to.”

“He will,” Margaret said, “I’ve never known him to go back on his word yet.”

“Trust Margaret to stick up for David. Anyway, I’ve taken the precaution to put it in writing, as you know, and the document is filed.”

“We’re not adopting this infant legally.”

“No, Gertrude, we can’t,—yet, but morally we are. She isn’t an infant, she’s ten years old. I wish you girls would take the matter a little more seriously. We’ve bound ourselves to be responsible for this child’s whole future. We have undertaken her moral, social and religious education. Her body and soul are to be—”

“Equally divided among us,” Gertrude cut in.

Beulah scorned the interruption.

“—held sacredly in trust by the six of us, severally and collectively.”

“Why haven’t we adopted her legally then?” Margaret asked. 16

“Well, you see, there are practical objections. You have to be a corporation or an institution or something, to adopt a child as a group. A child can’t have three sets of parents in the eyes of the law, especially when none of them is married, or have the least intention of being married, to each other.—I don’t see what you want to keep laughing at, Gertrude. It’s all a little unusual and modern and that sort of thing, but I don’t think it’s funny. Do you, Margaret?”

“I think that it’s funny, but I think that it’s serious, too, Beulah.”

“I don’t see what’s funny about—” Beulah began hotly.

“You don’t see what’s funny about anything,—even Rogers College, do you, darling? It is funny though for the bunch of us to undertake the upbringing of a child ten years old; to make ourselves financially and spiritually responsible for it. It’s a lot more than funny, I know, but it doesn’t seem to me as if I could go on with it at all, until somebody was willing to admit what a scream the whole thing is.”

“We’ll admit that, if that’s all you want, won’t we, Beulah?” Margaret appealed.

“If I’ve got this insatiable sense of humor, let’s 17 indulge it by all means,” Gertrude laughed. “Go on, chillun, go on, I’ll try to be good now.”

“I wish you would,” Margaret said. “Confine yourself to a syncopated chortle while I get a few facts out of Beulah. I did most of my voting on this proposition by proxy, while I was having the measles in quarantine. Beulah, did I understand you to say you got hold of your victim through Mrs. O’Farrel, your seamstress?”

“Yes, when we decided we’d do this, we thought we’d get a child about six. We couldn’t have her any younger, because there would be bottles, and expert feeding, and well, you know, all those things. We couldn’t have done it, especially the boys. We thought six would be just about the right age, but we simply couldn’t find a child that would do. We had to know about its antecedents. We looked through the orphan asylums, but there wasn’t anything pure-blooded American that we could be sure of. We were all agreed that we wanted pure American blood. I knew Mrs. O’Farrel had relatives on Cape Cod. You know what that stock is, a good sea-faring strain, and a race of wonderfully fine women, ‘atavistic aristocrats’ I remember an author in the Atlantic Monthly called them once. I suppose 18 you think it’s funny to groan, Gertrude, when anybody makes a literary allusion, but it isn’t. Well, anyway, Mrs. O’Farrel knew about this child, and sent for her. She stayed with Mrs. O’Farrel over Sunday, and now David is bringing her here. She’ll be here in a minute.”

“Why David?” Gertrude twinkled.

“Why not David?” Beulah retorted. “It will be a good experience for him, besides David is so amusing when he tries to be, I thought he could divert her on the way.”

“It isn’t such a crazy idea, after all, Gertrude.” Margaret Hutchinson was the youngest of the three, being within several months of her majority, but she looked older. Her face had that look of wisdom that comes to the young who have suffered physical pain. “We’ve got to do something. We’re all too full of energy and spirits, at least the rest of you are, and I’m getting huskier every minute, to twirl our hands and do nothing. None of us ever wants to be married,—that’s settled; but we do want to be useful. We’re a united group of the closest kind of friends, bound by the ties of—of—natural selection, and we need a purpose in life. Gertrude’s a real artist, but the rest of us are not, and—and—” 19

“What could be more natural for us than to want the living clay to work on? That’s the idea, isn’t it?” Gertrude said. “I can be serious if I want to, Beulah-land, but, honestly, girls, when I come to face out the proposition, I’m almost afraid to. What’ll I do with that child when it comes to be my turn? What’ll Jimmie do? Buy her a string of pearls, and show her the night life of New York very likely. How’ll I break it to my mother? That’s the cheerful little echo in my thoughts night and day. How did you break it to yours, Beulah?”

Beulah flushed. Her serious brown eyes, deep brown with wine-colored lights in them, met those of each of her friends in turn. Then she