Not the least of the dissatisfactions that had grown in Sidney’s breast was belonging to an Estate.

Since the death of Joseph Romley four years earlier, the royalties from his published verse and the government bonds and the oil stock, that had never paid any dividend but might any year, and the four young daughters were managed by two trustees who had been college friends of the poet and who, even in his lifetime, had managed what of his affairs had had any managing. One was a banker and one was a lawyer and they lived in New York, making only rare visits to Middletown. They considered it far better for Isolde and Trude to visit them twice a year and to such an arrangement both older girls were quite agreeable.

But Sidney, knowing the Trustees only as two brusque busy men who talked rapidly and called her “mouse” and “youngster” and brought her childish presents and huge boxes of candy which never contained her favorite chocolate alligators, found them embarrassingly lacking in the dramatic qualities a “guardian,” to be of any value to a girl, should possess. Nor did they ever bother their heads in the least as to what she did or didn’t do! In fact no one did. There seemed to be only one law that controlled her and everything in the big old house—what one could afford to do! She disliked the word.

She resented, too, the Middletown Branch of the League of American Poets. This was a band of women and a scattering of men who had pledged to foster the art of verse-making; a few of them really wrote poetry, a few more understood it, the greater number belonged to the League as Associates. Before Joseph Romley’s death Sidney had thought them only very funny because her father and Trude and Isolde thought them funny. There had been then a great timidity in their approach. They had seemed to tremble in their adoring gratitude for a hastily scrawled autograph; they had sometimes knocked at the back door and with deep apologies asked if they might slip in very quietly and take a time exposure of THE desk where Joseph Romley worked. They brought senseless gifts which they left unobtrusively on the piano or the hall rack. They dragged their own daughters to the old house for awkwardly formal calls upon Isolde and Trude. But after her father’s death even Sidney realized that the League ladies were different. They were not shy any more, they swooped down upon the little household and cleaned and baked and sewed and “deared” the four girls, actually almost living in the house. Isolde and Trude had made no protest and had gone around with troubled faces and had talked far into the nights in the bed which they shared. Then one morning at breakfast Isolde had announced: “The League has paid the mortgage on this house so that we can keep our home here. It is very good of them—I’m sure I don’t know where we could have gone. We must show them how grateful we are.” And Sidney had come to know, by example and the rebukes cast her way by Isolde, that “showing them” meant living, not as they might want to live—but as the League expected the four daughters of a great poet to live. That was the price for the mortgage. The League wanted to say possessively: “This is Joseph Romley’s second daughter” or “That is our lamb who was only ten months old when the poor mother died. I am sure the great man would not have known what to do if it had not been for old Huldah Mueller who stayed on and took care of the house and the children for him. He wrote a sonnet to Huldah once. It was worth a month’s wages to the woman—” And the League had bought its right to that possessive tone. Sidney, when Isolde could not see, indulged in naughty faces behind stout Mrs. Milliken’s back and confided to her chum, Nancy Stevens, the story of how Dad had once, in a rage of impatience, called down to the adoring Mrs. Milliken, waiting in the hall for an autograph: “Madam, if you don’t go off at once and leave me alone I’ll come down to you in my pajamas! I tell you I’ve gone to bed.” Oh, Mrs. Milliken had fled then!

Sidney had to go to Miss Downs’ stupid private day school when she would have preferred the Middletown High (as long as she could not go away to a boarding school), simply because Miss Downs was one of the directors of the League and gave her her tuition as a scholarship.

But Sidney had never thought—until Isolde had spoken so strangely a moment before—that her sisters minded either the Trustees or the League or having to be “different.” Isolde naturally was everything the League wanted her to be, with her grave eyes and her cloudy hair with the becoming fillets and her drawling voice and her clever smocks. Trude always wanted to oblige everyone anyway, and Vicky was so pretty that it didn’t make any difference what she did. Sidney had considered that she was alone in her rebellion, a rebellion that had flamed in her outburst of the morning: “I’m sick of being different!”

Isolde’s words of a moment before, with their hard hint of some portentous meaning, started a train of thought now in Sidney’s mind that drove away all joy in the promise of the next Egg, that made her even forget her dislike of the duty Isolde had so unexpectedly put upon her. Isolde had said distinctly: “You can’t get away from it—look at me—look at Trude!” And it had sounded queer, bitter, as though somewhere down deep in her Isolde nursed an unhappy feeling about something. Sidney pondered, lingering in the deserted dining room. Maybe, after all, Isolde did not like being the daughter of a poet and her smocks and her fillets and all the luncheons and teas to which she had to go and the speeches of appreciation she had to make. And what did Trude dislike? She always seemed happy but maybe she wanted something. Sidney remembered once hearing Trude cry terribly hard in the study. She and Dad had been talking at dinner about college. They had come to the door of the study and Dad had said: “It can’t be done, sonny.” That’s what Dad had always called Trude because she was the boy of the family. Trude had come out with her face all shiny with tears and her father had stood on the threshold of the door with his hair rumpled and his nose twitching the way it did when something bothered him. That was probably it. Trude had wanted college. That seemed silly to Sidney who hated lessons, at least the kind Miss Downs gave, but it was too bad to have good old Trude, who was such a peach, want anything.

Isolde hadn’t included Vicky, but then Vicky couldn’t want anything. She wasn’t afraid to fly in the faces of the Trustees and the whole League and they wouldn’t mind if she did. She was as clever as she was pretty. She could take the old dresses which Mrs. Custer and Mrs. White, the Trustees’ wives, and Mrs. Deering whom Isolde had visited in Chicago, and Godmother Jocelyn sent every now and then and make the stunningest new dresses. And once an artist from New York had painted her portrait and exhibited it in Paris and had won a medal for it. The League ladies approved of that and always told of it.

Vicky had whole processions of beaux who came and crowded in the chairs in the front room or sat on the broad window sills of the open windows smoking while she talked to them or played for them. Isolde’s few beaux were not noisy and jolly like Vick’s—they all looked as though the League might have picked them out from some assortment. They usually read to Isolde verses of their own or made her read them some of Dad’s. Maybe, Sidney’s thoughts shot out at a new angle—maybe Isolde did not like beaux who were poets, liked Vick’s kind of men better.

Trude had only one beau and Sidney had never seen him because Trude had had him when she was visiting Aunt Edith White. Trude and Isolde had whispered a great deal about him and Trude had let Isolde read his letters. Then a letter had come that had made Trude look all queer and white and Isolde, after she had read it, had gone to Trude and put her arms around her neck and Isolde only did a thing like that when something dreadful happened. Sidney had hoped that she might find the letter lying around somewhere so carelessly that she could be pardoned for reading it, but though she had looked everywhere she had never found it. She had had to piece together Trude’s romance from the fabric of her agile imagination.

Sidney had often tried to make herself hate the old house. Though it was a jolly, rambly place it was so very down-at-the heels and the light that poured in through the windows made things look even barer and shabbier. Nancy Stevens lived in one of the new bungalows near the school and it was beautiful with shiny furniture and rugs that felt like woolly bed slippers under one’s tread and two pairs of curtains at each window and Nancy’s own room was all pink even to the ruffled stuff hung over her bed like a tent. But Sidney had once heard Mrs. Milliken say to Isolde: “I hope, dear girl, that you will not be tempted to change this fine old house in any way—to leave it just as your father lived in it is the greatest tribute we can pay to his memory.” After that Sidney knew there was no use hinting for even one pair of curtains. But her sisters had seemed quite contented.

There had been a disturbing ring of finality to Isolde’s, “You can’t get away from it,” that seemed almost to slap Sidney in the face. Would they always—at least she and Isolde and Trude, Vick would manage to escape someway—be bound down there in the “quaint” bare house with the Trustees sending their skimpy allowances and long letters of advice and the ladies of the League of Poets coming and going and owning them body and soul? What was to prevent such a fate? They didn’t have money enough to just say—“Dear ladies, take the old house and the desk and the pens and pencils and the old coat—they’re yours—” and run away and do what they pleased; probably a whole dozen of Eggs would not get them anywhere!

“What are you doing mooning there in the window?” cried Vick from the open door. Her arms were filled with a litter of boxes and old portfolios. “Where’s Isolde? I want her to know I dusted things in the study.”

“Isolde’s writing letters. Then she’s going to dye something.”

“On Saturday!”

“Yes. I’m going to receive the League visitors today.”

“You!” Victoria went off into such a peal of laughter that she had to lean against the door frame. “Oh—how funny! What’s ever in the air today.”

“I don’t know why it’s so funny. I’m—”

“Fifteen. So you are. But bless me, child, the Leaguers will never accept you in a middy blouse and pigtails. What’s Isolde thinking of? And you look much too plump! Now—” But Sidney stalked haughtily past her tormenter into the hall.

Vick’s bantering, however, had stung her. The old clock on the stair landing chiming out the approaching hour of the League visitors warned Sidney that there was not time to change her middy with its faded collar; nor to wind the despised pigtails, around her head in the fashion Mrs. Milliken called “So beautifully quaint.” Anyway, if there were all the time in the world she would not do it. She’d begin right now being her own self and not something the League wanted her to be because she was a poet’s daughter! Isolde and Trude might yield weakly to their fate but she would be strong. Perhaps, some day, she would rescue them—even Vicky!

But as an unmistakable wave of chattering from without struck her ear her fine defiance deserted her. She ran to the door and peeped through one of the narrow windows that framed the door on either side.

At the gate stood Mrs. Milliken and a strange woman. Behind them, in twos, stretched a long queue of girls—girls of about her own age. They wore trim serge dresses with white collars, all alike. They carried notebooks in their hands. They leaned toward one another, whispering, giggling.

Sidney’s heart gave a tremendous bound. It was most certainly a boarding school! It was the nearest she had ever been to one! She forgot her middy and the hated pigtails, and the dread of the League. She threw open the door. Mrs. Milliken’s voice came to her: “He died on April tenth, Nineteen eighteen. He had just written that sonnet to the West Wind. You know it I am sure. He bought this house when he came to Middletown but he made it his as though he’d lived in it all his life—we have left it exactly as it was when he was with us—our committee——”

They came walking slowly toward the house, Mrs. Milliken and the strange woman with reverent mien, the wriggling queue still whispering and giggling.