“Oh! I don’t remember exactly;” he replied vaguely and cheerfully. “We talked a good deal--at least _I_ did,” with a sudden realization of how he had monopolized the conversation. “About French boarding-schools and women professors and getting plucked in examinations, and I told her about that scrape you wrote me of. She hasn’t a bit of nonsense about her,” he went on enthusiastically. “She didn’t say much, but I am sure she agreed with me that girls are by nature flirts, and not mathematicians.” Miss Allardyce gave a little gasp. “Well,” she said, with a sort of desperate calmness, “you’ve done it now! Do you know who that was you were talking to? That was the assistant-professor of mathematics. Oh! yes, I know she looks awfully young, and she is young. I suppose you think a woman has to be fifty before she knows anything. Why she only took her degree two years ago, and she was so tremendously clever that she went off and studied a year in Leipsic and then came back as instructor in mathematics, and this year when one of the assistant-professors was called suddenly to Europe, she was made assistant-professor in her place, and they say she’s been a most wonderful success. And I know she is pretty; but that doesn’t prevent her examinations from being terrors, and I didn’t get through the last one at all, and if you told her about that scrape, and that women ought not to be mathematicians----” she stopped breathlessly and in utter despair. Allardyce whistled softly and then struck his stick sharply against the side of the little dock. “Well,” he exclaimed indignantly, “she’s most deceitfully young and pretty,” and then he turned reproachfully upon his sister. “It’s all your fault,” he said; “what did you go off walking for?” “LA BELLE HÉLÈNE” _Mrs. Olmsted Morrison to Mrs. Franklin Bennett, Rhinebeck-on-Hudson_ BALTIMORE, October 20th.