Little Miss Severance sat with her hands as cold as ice. The stage of her coming adventure was beautifully set-the conventional stage for the adventure of a young girl, her mother's drawing-room. Her mother had the art of setting stages. The room was not large, -a New York brownstone front in the upper Sixties even though altered as to entrance, and allowed to sprawl backward over yards not originally intended for its use, is not a palace, -but it was a room and not a corridor; you had the comfortable sense of four walls about you when its one small door was once shut. It was filled, perhaps...

Mrs. Ussher was having a small house party in the country over New Year's Day. This is equivalent to saying that the half dozen most fashionable people in New York were out of town. Certain human beings are admitted to have a genius for discrimination in such matters as objects of art, pigs or stocks. Mrs. Ussher had this same instinct in regard to fashion, especially where fashions in people were concerned. She turned toward hidden social availability very much as the douser's hazel wand turns toward the hidden spring. When she crossed the room to speak to some woman after dinner, whatever...

Whenever she and Lydia had a scene Miss Bennett thought of the first scene she had witnessed in the Thorne household. She saw before her a vermillion carpet on a mottled marble stair between high, polished-marble walls. There was gilt in the railing, and tall lanky palms stood about in majolica pots. Up this stairway an angry man was carrying an angrier child. Miss Bennett could see that broad back in its heavy blue overcoat, and his neck, above which the hair was still black, crimsoning with fury and exertion. On one side of him she could see the thin arms and clutching hands of the little...

The editor of that much-abused New York daily, Liberty, pushed back his editorial typewriter and opened one letter in the pile which the office-boy-no respecter of persons-had just laid upon the desk while whistling a piercing tune between his teeth.

THE window of Randolph Reed's office was almost completely covered by magnificent gold block lettering. This to any one who had time and ability to read it-and the former was more common in the community than the latter-conveyed the information that Reed dealt in every kind of real estate, from country palaces to city flats. The last item was put in more for the sake of symmetry than accuracy, for the small Southern town contained nothing approaching an apartment house.

Geoffrey Holland stood up and for the second time surveyed the restaurant in search of other members of his party, two fingers in the pocket of his waistcoat, as if they had just relinquished his watch. He was tall enough to be conspicuous and well bred enough to be indifferent to the fact, good looking, in a bronzed, blond clean-shaven way, and branded in the popular imagination as a young and active millionaire.

You're twenty-one to-day, Willie, And a danger lurks at the door, I've known about it always, But I never spoke before; When you were only a baby It seemed so very remote, But you're twenty-one to-day, Willie, And old enough to vote.

"Are Women People" from Alice Duer Miller. American writer and poet (1874-1942).

"Come Out of the Kitchen" from Alice Duer Miller. American writer and poet (1874-1942).