But she no longer speaks to Elsie about wrinkling her forehead or showing her boot-soles. It is eye to eye and heart to heart, and only straight talk between them now, as between women who know. THE HARSHAW BRIDE [Mrs. Tom Daly, of Bisuka in the Northwest, writes to her invalid sister spending the summer on the coast of Southern California.] I You know I am always ready to sacrifice truth to politeness, if the truth is of that poor, stingy upstart variety everybody is familiar with and if the occasion warrants the expense. We all know politeness is not cheap, any more than honesty is politic. But surely I mistook my occasion, one day last winter--and now behold the price! We are to have a bride on our hands, or a bride-elect, for she isn't married yet. The happy man to be is rustling for a home out here in the wilds of Idaho while she is waiting in the old country for success to crown his efforts. How much success in her case is demanded one does not know. She is a little English girl, upper middle class, which Mrs. Percifer assures us is _the_ class to belong to in England at the present day,--from which we infer that it's her class; and the interesting reunion is to take place at our house--the young woman never having seen us in her life before. She sailed, poor thing, this day week and will be forwarded to us by her confiding friends in New York as soon as she arrives. Meantime she will have heard from us from the Percifers: that is something. Really they were very nice to us in New York, last winter, the Percifers--though one must not plume one's self too much. It began as a business flirtation down town between the husbands, and then Tom confidingly mentioned that he had a wife at his hotel. We unfortunate women were dragged into it forthwith, and more or less forced to live up to it. I cannot say there was anything riotous in the way she sustained her part. She was so very impersonal in fact, when we said good-by, that my natural tendency to invite people to come and stay with us, on the spur of any moment, was strangled in my throat.