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PLUCK
29

the girls were dressed in rakish flannel shirts and wore mannish ties. Oh, if only Nina had been there to tell her what to wear! She could hardly converse, her mistake troubled her so keenly.

This was the fourth season that this particular group of men and girls had managed to meet together, here in the heart of the snow-covered mountains, for a week of winter sports over "the twenty-second." A summer hotel opened for the entire month of February to accommodate such enthusiasts. Instead of tennis rackets, and golf clubs, and mountain staffs, its halls and verandas were filled with skis, skates, snow-shoes and toboggans. It was through her friendship with Nina Borst that Edna Miller found herself one of the Bartlett party this year. Nina was a charter member, and an enthusiastic one, too.

It was last summer when Nina had been describing the delights of the winter woods to Edna Miller, who was convalescing from one of her frequent operations, detailing to her the peculiar joy there was in skimming over the tops of barbed wire fences on snow-shoes, nosing about the alders on the level of last year's birds' nests, following luring trails—when sometimes one had to glance down on the trunks of the trees, instead of up, to find the blaze—that the frail little invalid's eyes had lit up, and she had exclaimed, "Oh,