Antonia at half past nine? Dolly and Durland sometimes sleep rather late--so good for them, I think--but Antonia is up early. She reads sometimes from five o'clock. She reads a great deal--everything."
"Quite the little genius, according to mother," said Dolly.
"She is clever," answered Mrs. Conway passionately. "I don't know why you two are always so disagreeable about your little sister."
"Because you spoil her so, mother," said Dolly.
"Because she's so dirty, mother," said Durland.
Mrs. Conway made this attack a means of aligning herself with her children against the governess.
"Oh, well," she said, "that is all going to be changed now. Miss Exeter is going to make us all over. Antonia is to be clean and tidy, though why in the world your uncle thinks it desirable for a child of eleven to think of nothing but clothes I can't see. And Durland is to made into a mathematician. I suppose I'm very ignorant, but I never could see what good algebra does a person--all about greyhounds leaping after hares, and men doing pieces of work at seventy-five cents a day. I wish I could find some like that. Poor Durland, like so many people with a creative turn of mind, simply cannot do mathematics."
"More people than creative geniuses are poor at mathematics," said Pearl genially; and Durland, afraid that she would identify