VES S eB Oi ie Kore Yas

I despised her utterly as she chirped on. She was trite, vapid, and, I was
sure, heartless; a weak, silly, aimless sentimentalist. When the tea and cakes
came I could not enjoy them, delicious as they both were. The china was
exquisite ; the gold spoons tinkled against it with a bell-like chime; into the
summer air of the room stole the odors of the adjoining conservatory; there
were rare pictures, statuary and tapestries. The whole world was padded, and
warmed, and scented for this useless little insect. What mattered it that winter,
and poverty, and illness, and sorrow were in other homes, so long as she still sat
in the rose’s heart ?

““My casket, please, Mary,” twittered the thin voice, after the tea-service
was removed. “ And turn the gas up, just a little.”

The casket —an Hast Indian toy, all ivory, gold and ebony — was unlocked,
and the smell of sandal-wood gushed forth. Miss Betty giggled in adjusting
her eyeglasses.

““ My eyes are weak by artificial light. They ought not to be, but I have
done so much fancy-work. Iso often hear of interesting cases after dark, that
I keep checks ready made out. It saves eyesight, and time, and trouble, don’t
you know? Ah!”

She had fumbled among the papers in the casket until she found what she
sought, and passed it over to me as she might a postage stamp.

“Tell your mother how awfully obliged I am to her, and beg her to let me
know if I can do anything else for those poor dear protégés of hers.”’

I lost breath and wits upon seeing that the check was for one hundred
dollars.

“O, Miss Butterfly! Oh!—TI beg your pardon.” I stopped there, red as
fire and longing to sink clean out of sight.

She laughed in short, spasmodic jerks, as if something attached to her vocal
apparatus were going to pieces.

‘‘ No offense, I do assure you, my blessed child. All my children call me
that, and I don’t object. God made butterflies, I suppose, and they couldn’t be
ants if they wanted to. I admire energy, and thrift, and all that, immensely,
but, as my slangy nephews say, I wasn’t built that way. I don’t murmur.
The Bible says there are diversities of gifts. All that a butterfly wants is sun-
shine and honey.”

I repeated the phrase often and again that winter. I cannot say that I
found entertainment in the society of one whom, from that afternoon, I learned
to love, but there was gratification in the sight of the simple kindly creature
living out her life with the zest of a child. I went to her almost daily, and
always found her the same; never ruffled in spirit, never unkind in speech,
always carefully and richly dressed, and ever eager to share her sunshine and
honey with all about her. The fancy crossed my mind, sometimes, that she
was growing thin, and, occasionally, in the forenoon, there was a strange gray-