"A contented mind is a continual feast," said Belle, sarcastically, when she heard Julia telling some one how much she had enjoyed a certain evening. "Why, I do not think that Julia was on the floor twice. Whenever I saw her she was talking to wall flowers, or small boys who ought to have been at home or in bed." By "small boy," Belle meant any one who was not yet in college, for she herself was hardly polite to any one younger than a sophomore, and she wondered that any hostess to whose house she was invited should think of having any one there younger than this. But the best-intentioned hostess sometimes had young cousins or nephews whom she wished to invite, and the two or three years' difference in age between a sophomore and a boy still in the preparatory school did not count for much in her eyes, however it may have been regarded by some of the girls of Belle's age.