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“What, dear?”

“What did you say father doesn’t like–in the Castants?”

“Oh, the blood, the family. This generation is all right–apparently. But blood will tell. You are too young to know all the old histories that fathers and mothers read young people by.”

“I think we are what we are,” said Elsie; “we are not our great-grandfathers.”

“In a measure we are, and it should teach us charity. Not as much can be expected of Billy Castant, coming of the stock he does, as you might expect of that ancestry,” and Mrs. Valentin nodded toward the formidable Eastern contingent. (Elsie was consciously hating them already.) “The fountain can rise no higher than its source.”

“I thought there was supposed to be a source a little higher than the ground–unless we are no more than earth-born fountains.”

“‘Out of the mouth of babes,'” said Mrs. Valentin, laughing gently. “I own it, dear. Middle age is suspicious and mean and unspiritual and troubled about many things. A middle-aged mother is like an old hen when hawks are sailing around; she can’t see the sky.”

“Yes,” said Elsie, settling cosily against her mother’s shoulder. “I always know when mammy speaks as my official mother, and when she is talking ‘straight talk.’ I shall be so happy when she believes I am old enough to hear only straight talk.”

* * * * *

“I’ve got a surprise for you, Elsie,” said Mrs. Valentin, a day and a night eastward of the Sierras. They were on the Great Plains, at that stage of an overland journey which suggests, in the words of a clever woman, the advisability of “taking a tuck in the continent.”

Elsie’s eyebrows seemed to portend that surprises are not always pleasant.

“I’ve been talking with our Eastern lady, and imagine! her daughter is one of Mrs. Barrington’s girls too. This will be her second year. So there is”–

“An offset to Gladys,” Elsie interrupted.

“So there is a chance for you to know one girl, at least, of the type I’ve always been holding up to you, always believed in, though the individuals are so rare.”

Elsie’s sentiments, unexpressed, were that she wished they might be rarer. Not that the flower of Eastern culture was not all her mother protested she was; but there are crises of discouragement on the upward climb of trying to realize a mother’s ambitions for one’s self, when one is only a girl–the only girl, on whom the family experiments are all to be wreaked. Elsie suffered in silence many a pang that her mother never dreamed of–pangs of effort unavailing and unappreciated. She wished to conform to her mother’s exigent standard, but she could not, all at once, and be a girl too–a girl of sixteen, a little off the key physically, not having come to a woman’s repose of movement; a little stridulous mentally, but pulsing with life’s dumb music of aspiration; as intense as her mother in feeling, without her mother’s power to throw off the strain in words.

“Well, mother?” she questioned.

“She is older than you, and she will be at home. The advances, of course, must come from her, but I hope, dear, you will not be–you will try to be responsive?”

“I never know, mother, when I am not responsive. It’s like wrinkling my forehead; it does itself.”

Mrs. Valentin made a gesture expressive of the futility of argument under certain not unfamiliar conditions.

“‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.’ I am leading my Pegasus to the fountain of–what was the fountain?”

Elsie laughed. “Your Pegasus is pretty heavy on the wing, mammy. But I will drink. I will gorge myself, truly I will. The money shall not be spent in vain.”

“Oh, the money! Who cares about the money?–if only there were more of it.”

They stopped over night in Chicago, and Mrs. Valentin bought some shirt-waists; for the heat had “doubled up on them,” as a Kansas farmer on the train remarked.