make home bright and be given things. He was irritated that they

would not remain at this, and still more irritated that they failed

to suppress altogether their natural interest in young men. The

tandems would be steered by weird and devious routes to evade the

bare chance of his bloodshot eye. My aunt seemed to have no ideas

whatever about what was likely to happen to her children. She had

indeed no ideas about anything; she took her husband and the days as

they came.

I cansee now the pathetic difficulty of my cousins' position in

life; the absence of any guidance or instruction or provision for

their development. They supplemented the silences of home by the

conversation of schoolfellows and the suggestions of popular

fiction. They had to make what they could out of life with such

hints as these. The church was far too modest to offer them any

advice. It was obtruded upon mymind upon my first visit that they

were both carrying on correspondences and having little furtive

passings and seeings and meetings with the mysterious owners of

certain initials, S. and L. K., and, if Iremember rightly, "the R.

N." brothers and cousins, I suppose, of their friends. The same

thing was going on, with a certain intensification, at my next

visit, excepting only that the initials were different. But when I

came again their methods were maturer or I was no longer a

negligible quantity, and the notes and the initials were no longer

flaunted quite so openly in my face.

My cousins had worked it out from the indications of their universe

that the end of life is to have a "good time." They used the

phrase. That and the drives in dog-carts were only the first of

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