March 1. During my visit I heard much about you from Mrs. Blodgett and Agnes, for your name was constantly on their lips. From them I learned that your birth, wealth, and the influence of your uncle had involved you in a fashionable society for which you cared nothing, and that, aside from the gayety which that circle forced upon you, your time was spent in travel, and in reading, music, and charitable work. Except for themselves, they averred, you had no intimate friends, and their explanation of this fact proved to me that you had taken our separation as seriously as had I.

"After Mr. Walton brought her to America she spent the first few months with us," Mrs. Blodgett told me, "and was the loneliest child I ever saw. Her big eyes used to look so wistfully at times that I could hardly bear it, yet not a word did she ever speak of her sorrow. And all on account of that wretch and his son! I think the worse men are, the more a good woman loves them! When Maizie was old enough to understand, and Mr. Walton told her how she had been robbed, she wouldn't believe him till Mr. Blodgett confirmed the story. She used to be always talking of the two, but she has never spoken of them since that night."

Even more cruel to me was something Agnes related. She worshiped you with the love and admiration a girl of eighteen sometimes feels for a girl of twenty-three, and in singing your praises,—to a most willing listener,—one day, she exclaimed, "Oh, I wish I were a man, so that I could be her lover! I'd make her believe in love." Then seeing my questioning look, Agnes continued: "What with her selfish old uncle, and the men who want to marry her for her money, and those hateful Maitlands, she has been made to distrust all love and friendship. She has the idea that she isn't lovable,—that people don't like her for herself; and I really think she will never marry, just because of it."

Better far than this knowledge of you at second-hand was Mr. Blodgett's telling me that you were to dine with them during my visit. It may seem absurd, but not the least part of my eagerness that night was to see you in evening dress. If I had not loved you already, I should have done so from that meeting; and although you are dear to me for many things besides your beauty, I understand why men love you so deeply who know nothing of your nature. That all men should not love you is my only marvel whenever I recall that first glimpse of you as you entered the Blodgetts' drawing-room.

Before we had finished our greetings Mr. Whitely entered, and though I little realized how vital a part he was to be of my life, I yet regarded him with instant interest, for something in his manner towards you suggested to me that he coveted the hand you offered him.

A lover does not view a rival kindly, but I am compelled to own that he is handsome. If I had the right to cavil, I could criticise only his mouth, which it seems to me has slyness with a certain cruel firmness; but I did not notice this until I knew him better, and perhaps it is only my imagination, born of later knowledge. I am not so blinded by my jealousy as to deny his perfect manner, for one feels the polished surface, touch the outside where one will.

Your demeanor towards him was friendly, yet with all its graciousness it seemed to me to have a quality not so much of aloofness as of limit; conveying in an indefinable way the fact that such relations as then existed between you were the only possible ones. It was a shading so imperceptible that I do not think the Blodgetts realized it, and I should have questioned if Mr. Whitely himself were conscious of it, but for one or two things he said in the course of the evening, which had to me, under the veil of a general topic, individual suggestion.

We were discussing that well-worn question of woman's education, Mrs. Blodgett having introduced the apple of discord by a sweeping disapproval of college education for women, on the ground that it prevented their marrying.

"They get to know too much, eh?" laughed Mr. Blodgett.

"No," cried Mrs. Blodgett, "they get to know too little! While they ought to be out in the world studying life and men, so as to choose wisely, they're shut up in dormitories filling their brains with Greek and mathematics."

"You would limit a woman's arithmetic to the solution of how to make one and one, one?" I asked, smiling.

"Surely, Mrs. Blodgett, you do not mean that an uncultivated woman makes the best wife?" inquired Mr. Whitely.

"I mean," rejoined Mrs. Blodgett, "that women who know much of books know little of men. That's why over-intellectual women always marry fools."

"How many intellectual wives there must be!" you said.

"I shouldn't mind if they only married fools," continued Mrs. Blodgett, "but half the time they don't marry at all."

"Does that prove or disprove their intellect?" you asked.

"It means," replied Mrs. Blodgett, "that they are so puffed up with their imaginary knowledge that they think no man good enough for them."

"I've known one or two college boys graduate with the same large ideas," remarked Mr. Blodgett.

"But a man gets over it after a few years," urged Mrs. Blodgett, "and is none the worse off; but by the time a girl overcomes the idea, she's so old that no man worth having will look at her."

"I rather think, Mrs. Blodgett," said Mr. Whitely, in that charmingly deferential manner he has with women, "that some men do not try to win highly educated women because they are abashed by a sense of their own inferiority."

"Where do those men hide themselves, Whitely?" interrogated Mr. Blodgett.

"I'll not question the reason," retorted Mrs. Blodgett. "The fact that over-educated girls think themselves above men is all I claim."

"I don't think, Mrs. Blodgett," you corrected, "it is so much a feeling of superiority as it is a change in the aims of marriage. Formerly, woman married to gain a protector, and man to gain a housewife. Now, matrimony is sought far less for service, and far more for companionship."

"But, Miss Walton," questioned Mr. Whitely, "does not the woman ask too much nowadays? She has the leisure to read and study, but a business man cannot spare the time. Is it fair, then, to expect that he shall be as cultivated as she can make herself?"

"That is, I think, the real cause for complaint," you answered. "The business man is so absorbed in money-making that he sacrifices his whole time to it. I can understand a woman falling in love with a lance or a sword, dull companions though they must have been, but it seems to me impossible for any woman to love a minting-machine, even though she might be driven to marry it for its product."

"That's rough on us, Whitely," laughed Mr. Blodgett good-naturedly; but Mr. Whitely reddened, and you, as if to divert the subject from this personal tendency, turned and surmised to me:—

"I suppose that as a German, Dr. Hartzmann, you think a woman should be nothing more than a housekeeper?"

"Why not suggest, Miss Walton," I replied, smiling, "that as an Orientalist I must think the seraglio woman's proper sphere?"

"But, Miss Walton," persisted Mr. Whitely, not accepting your diversion, "a man, to be successful nowadays, must give all his attention to his business.

"I presume that is so," you acceded; "but could he not be content with a little less success in money-making, and strive to acquire a few more amenities?"

"Maizie wants us all to be painters and poets and musicians," asserted Mr. Blodgett.

"Not at all," you denied.

"Oh, Maizie!" cried Agnes. "You know you said the other day that you hoped I wouldn't marry a business man."

"I said 'only a business man,' Agnes," you replied, without a trace of the embarrassment so many women would have shown. "Because men cannot all be clergymen is no reason for their knowing nothing of religion. There would be no painters, poets, or musicians if there were no dilettanti."

"Yet I think," argued Mr. Whitely, still as if he were trying to convince you of something, "that the successful business man has as much brain as most writers or artists."

"I have no doubt that is true," you assented. "So, too, a day laborer may have a good mind. But of what avail is a brain if it has never been trained, or has been trained to know only one thing?"

"But authors and painters are only specialists," urged Mr. Whitely.

"They are specialists of a very different type," you responded, "from the man whose daily thoughts are engrossed with the prices of pig-iron or cotton sheetings. I think one reason why American girls frequently marry Europeans is that the foreign man is so apt to be more broadly cultivated."

"That's what I mean by saying that books unfit women to marry wisely," interjected Mrs. Blodgett. "They marry foreigners because they are more cultivated, without a thought of character."

"Indeed, Mrs. Blodgett," you observed, "has not the day gone by for thinking dullness a sign of honesty? And certainly a business career is far more likely to corrupt and harden men's natures than the higher professions, for its temptations and strifes are so much greater."

Your opinion was so in accord with what my father had often preached that I could not but wonder if his teachings still colored your thoughts. To test this idea as well as to learn your present view, I recurred to another theory of his by saying, "Does not the broader and more sensitive nature of the scholar or artist involve defects fully as serious as the hardness and narrowness of the business man? Some one has said that 'to marry a literary man is to domesticate a bundle of nerves.'"

"A nervous irritability," you replied, "which came from fine mental exertion, would be as nothing compared to my own fretting over enforced companionship with an unsympathetic or sordid nature." Then you laughed, and added, "I must have a very bad temper, for it is the only one which ever really annoys me."

That last speech told me how thoroughly the woman of twenty-three was a development of the child of fourteen, for I remembered how little my mother's anger used to disturb you, but how deeply and strongly your emotions affected you. I suppose it was absurd, but I felt happy to think that you had changed so little in character from the time when I knew you so well. And from that evening I never for an instant believed that you would marry Mr. Whitely, for I was sure that you could never love him. How could I dream that you, with beauty, social position, and wealth, would make a loveless marriage?

Good-night, my love.

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