Her energy may have been explained when, as soon as the stockings
were done, she asked her mother if she might go down to the Library.
Mother and Aunt Nettie from their rocking-chairs on the side-porch
watched the slim figure in its stiffly-starched white duck skirt and
shirt-waist disappear down shady Locust Avenue.
"I wonder what Missy's up to, now?" observed Aunt Nettie.
"Up to?" murmured Mrs. Merriam.
"Yes. She hardly touched her chop at dinner and she's crazy about
lamb chops. She's eaten almost nothing for days. And either shirking
her work, else going at it in a perfect frenzy!"
"Growing girls get that way sometimes," commented Missy's mother
gently. (Could Missy have heard and interpreted that tone, she might
have been less hard on grown-ups who "don't understand.") "Missy's
seventeen, you know."
"H'm!" commented Aunt Nettie, as if to say, "What's THAT to do with
it?" Somehow it seems more difficult for spinsters than for mothers
to remember those swift, free flights of madness and sweetness
which, like a troop of birds in the measurable heavens, sweep in
joyous circles across the sky of youth.
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