Three Pretty Maids

It was in a comfortable-looking house, surrounded by a garden, in the most attractive part of a pleasant city not two hundred miles from the nation’s capital, that the mother of the pretty maids sat sewing one day in early October. She was listening for the first footstep which should announce the return of her girls from school. And presently she heard the front door shut, then a quick, light step on the stair, and a voice coming nearer and nearer, singing,—

“Where are you going, my pretty maid?”

Then the door burst open and Persis Holmes appeared.

“Where are you going, my pretty maid?” Mrs. Holmes asked. “At the rate at which you are travelling I think you will go straight through the wall. Where are the others?”

Persis laughed. “I am going at something of a gait,” she replied. “I always do that way. I can’t be stately to save me. Where are the others? Let me see. Lisa was too dignified to run home, and Mellicent is so daft about Audrey Vane that she must walk home with her every day, consequently I,—only I,—the unqueenly, the unsentimental, am here, as you see, to get the kiss you have all fresh for me.” And Persis gave her mother a vigorous hug.

“I’m not sure but that you have more real sentiment than your sisters,” replied Mrs. Holmes, as she disengaged herself from the close hold of her daughter’s arms.

“I?” exclaimed Persis, opening her eyes very wide. “Why, mamma, I am the most practical child you have. Don’t I fly into the kitchen when Prue is out, and with real housewifely mind make gingerbread and ‘other country messes,’ like the neat-handed Phyllis in L’Allegro? And doesn’t papa always send me to pay bills when he cannot go himself? And—why, mamma, I’m not queenly like Lisa, nor seraphic like Mellicent. I am just plain me, the least good-looking of your trio. I am the mortal, Lisa the queen, Mellicent the fairy. But a mortal can love you just as hard; can’t she, mamma?”

“Very hard,” laughed her mother, as a kindling glance of Persis’s eye showed signs of a second energetic attack.

“I spare you, mamma! I spare you,” began Persis. “Here comes Lisa. I must go and hunt up something to eat. I am half starved. Heigho, Miss Dignity! I beat you home, didn’t I?”

“I should hope so, if it depended upon my making a tom-boy of myself in order to get here first,” replied Lisa, lifting her hat from off her well-set little head. “Mamma, you have no idea what a terror Persis is. She romps home like a great hulk of a peasant girl.”

“Lisa was so mad because I tagged her ‘last,’” laughed Persis. “Lady Dignity was covered with confusion to that extent that you could scarcely see her.”

“Mamma, do make her behave properly,” entreated Lisa. “I shall choose some one else with whom to walk if this continues,” she said, imperiously, to her sister, who made a little grimace and escaped from the room.

“Persis is perfectly incorrigible,” continued Lisa, giving a gentle pat to the curling locks about her temples as she glanced toward the mirror.