I am deeply interested in Kilgariff’s case. I have thought all day and nearly all night about it. It seems to me to be a case in which a man is to be saved who is well worth saving. Not that I regard service in the ranks as either a hardship or a shame to any man, when the ranks are full of the best young men in all the land. If that were all, I would not have you turn your hand over to lift this man into place as a commissioned officer.

If I interpret the matter aright, Kilgariff is simply morbid, and if you can induce him to take the place you have pressed upon him, you will have cured him of his morbidity of mind. And I think you can do that. You know how I contemn the duello, and fortunately it seems passing out of use. In these war times, when every man stands up every day to be shot at by hundreds of men who are not scared, it would be ridiculous for any man to stand up and let one scared man shoot at him, in the hope of demonstrating his courage in that fashion.

That is an aside. What I want to say is, that while the duello has always been barbarous, and has now become ridiculous as well, nevertheless it had some good features, one of which I think you might use effectively in Owen Kilgariff’s case. As I understand the matter, it was the custom under the code duello, sometimes to call a “court of honour” to decide in a doubtful case precisely what honour required a man to do, and, as I understand, the decision of such a court was final, so far as the man whose duty was involved was concerned. It was deemed the grossest of offences to call in question the conduct of a man who acted in accordance with the finding of a court of honour.

Now why cannot you call a court of honour to sit upon this case? Without revealing Kilgariff’s identity—which of course you could not do except by his permission—you could lay before the court a succinct but complete statement of the case, and ask it to decide whether or not the man concerned can, with honour, accept a commission in the service without making the facts public. I am sure the verdict will be in the affirmative, and armed with such a decision you can overcome the poor fellow’s scruples and work a cure that is well worth working.

Try my plan if it commends itself to your judgment, not otherwise.

Little by little, I am finding out a good deal about our Evelyn Byrd. Better still, I am learning to know her, and she interests me mightily. She has a white soul and a mind that it is going to be a delight to educate. She has already read a good deal in a strangely desultory and unguided fashion, but her learning is utterly unbalanced.

For example, she has read the whole, apparently, of the Penny CyclopÆdia—in a very old edition—and she has accepted it all as unquestionable truth. Nobody had ever told the poor child that the science of thirty years ago has been revised and enlarged since that time, until I made the point clear to her singularly quick and receptive mind in the laboratory yesterday. She seems also to have read, and well-nigh committed to memory, the old plays published fifty or sixty years ago under the title of The British Drama, but she has hardly so much as heard of our great modern writers. She can repeat whole dialogues from Jane Shore, She Stoops to Conquer, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, High Life Below Stairs, and many plays of a much lower moral character; but even the foulest of them have manifestly done her no harm. Her own innocence seems to have performed the function of the feathers on a duck’s back in a shower. She is so unconscious of evil, indeed, that I do not care to explain my reasons to her when I suggest that she had better not repeat to others some of the literature that she knows by heart.

I still haven’t the faintest notion of her history, or of whence she came. She is docile in an extraordinary degree, but I think that is due in large measure to her exaggerated sense of what she calls my goodness to her. Poor child! It is certain that she never before knew much of liberty or much of considerate kindness. She seems scarcely able to realise, or even to believe, that in anything she is really free to do as best pleases her, a fact from which I argue that she has been subject always to the arbitrary will of others. She is by no means lacking in spirit, and I suspect that those others who have arbitrarily dominated her life have had some not altogether pleasing experiences with her. She is capable of very vigorous revolt against oppression, and her sense of justice is alert. But apparently she has never before been treated with justice or with any regard whatever to the rights of her individuality. She has been compelled to submit to the will of others, but she has undoubtedly made trouble for those who compelled her. At first with me she seemed always expecting some correction, some assertion of authority, and she is only now beginning to understand my attitude toward her, especially my insistence upon her right to decide for herself all things that concern only herself. The other day in the laboratory, she managed somehow to drop a beaker and break it. She was about to gather up the fragments, but, as the beaker had been filled with a corrosive acid, I bade her let them alone, saying that I would have them swept up after the day’s work should be done. She stood staring at me for a moment, after which she broke into a little rippling laugh, threw her arms around my neck, and said:—

“I forgot. You never scold me, even when I am careless and break things.”

I tried hard to make her understand that I had no right to scold her, besides having no desire to do so. It seemed a new gospel to her. Finally she said, more to herself than to me:— “It is so different here. There was never anybody so good to me.”

Her English is generally excellent, but it includes many odd expressions, some of them localisms, I think, though I do not know whence they come. Occasionally, too, she frames her English sentences after a French rhetorical model, and the result is sometimes amusing. And another habit of hers which interests me is her peculiar use of auxiliary verbs and intensives. Instead of saying, “I had my dinner,” she sometimes says, “I did have my dinner,” and to-day when we had strawberries and cream for snack, she said, “I do find the strawberries with the cream to be very good.”

Yet never once have I detected the smallest suggestion of “broken English” in her speech, except that now and then she places the accent on a wrong syllable, as a foreigner might. Thus, when she first came, she spoke of something as excellent. I spoke the word correctly soon afterward, and never since has she mispronounced it. Indeed, her quickness in learning and her exceeding conscientiousness promise to obliterate all that is peculiar in her speech before you get home again, unless you come quickly.

The girl doesn’t know what to make of Mammy. That dearest of despots has conceived a great affection for this new “precious chile,” and she tyrannises over her accordingly. She refused to let her get up the other morning until after she had taken a cup of coffee in bed, simply because no fire had been lighted in her room that morning. And how Mammy did scold when she learned that Evelyn, thinking a fire unnecessary, had sent the maid away who had gone to light it!

“You’se jes’ anudder sich as Mis’ Dorothy,” she said. “Jes’ case it’s spring yo’ won’t hab no fire to dress by even when it’s a-rainin’. An’ so you’se a-tryin’ to cotch yo death o’ cole, jes’ to spite ole Mammy. No, yo’ ain’t a-gwine to git up yit. Don’t you dar try to. You’se jes’ a-gwine to lay still till dem no-’count niggas in de dinin’-room sen’s you a cup o’ coffee what Mammy’s done tole ’em to bring jes’ as soon as it’s ready. An’ de next time you goes fer to stop de makin’ o’ you dressin’-fire, you’se a-gwine to heah from Mammy, yo’ is. Jes’ you bear dat in mind.”

Evelyn doesn’t quite understand. She says she thought we controlled our servants, while in fact they control us. But she heartily likes Mammy’s coddling tyranny—as what rightly constructed girl could fail to do? Do you know, Arthur, the worst thing about this war is that there’ll never be any more old mammies after it is ended?

I’m teaching Evelyn chemistry, among other things, and she learns with a rapidity that is positively astonishing. She has a perfect passion for precision, which will make her invaluable in the laboratory presently. Her deftness of hand, her accuracy, her conscientious devotion to whatever she does, are qualities that are hard to match. She never makes a false motion, even when doing the most unaccustomed things; and whatever she does, she does conscientiously, as if its doing were the sum of human duty. I am positively fascinated with her. If I were a man, I should fall in love with her in a fashion that would stop not at fire or flood. I ought to add that the girl is a marvel of frankness—as much as any child might be—and that her truthfulness is of the absolute, matter-of-course kind which knows no other way. But these things you will have inferred from what I have written before, if I have succeeded even in a small way in describing Evelyn’s character. I heartily wish I knew her history; not because of feminine curiosity, but because such knowledge might aid me in my effort to guide and educate her aright. However, no such aid is really necessary. With one so perfectly truthful, and so childishly frank, I shall need only to study herself in order to know what to do in her education.