This letter reached Dorothy in Paris, on her return through Switzerland, from an Italian journey, undertaken in the early summer before the danger of Roman fever should be threatening. Had such a letter come to her a few months earlier, her response to it would have been an utterly submissive assent to all that her guardian had done, with perhaps a wondering question or two as to why he should feel it necessary to ask her consent to anything he might be minded to do, or even to tell her what he had done. But Dorothy had grown steadily more reserved in her writing to him, as experience had slowly but surely awakened womanly consciousness in her soul. She was still as loyally devoted as ever to Arthur, but she shrank now as she had not been used to do, from too candid an expression of her devotion. The child had completely given place to the woman in her nature and the woman was far less ready than the child had been to reveal her feelings. A succession of suitors for her hand had taught Dorothy to think of herself as a woman bound to maintain a certain reserve in her intercourse with men. They had awakened in her a consciousness of the fact, of which she had scarcely even thought in the old, childish days, that Arthur Brent was a young man and Dorothy South a young woman, and that it would ill become Dorothy South to reveal herself too frankly to this young man. She did not quite know what there was in her mind to reveal or to withhold from revelation, but she instinctively felt the necessity strong upon her to guard herself against her own impulsive truthfulness. She had no more notion that she had dared give her woman’s love to Arthur unasked, than she had that he--who had never asked for it--desired her love. He remained to her in fact the enormously superior being that she had always held him to be, but she found herself blushing sometimes when she remembered the utter abandon with which she had been accustomed to lay bare her innermost thoughts and sentiments, her very soul, indeed, to his scrutiny. She knew of no reason why she should now alter her attitude or her demeanor towards him, and she resolutely determined that she would not in the least change either, yet the letter she wrote to him on this occasion was altogether unlike that which she would have written a few months earlier upon a like occasion. She expressed her approval of all that he had done with respect to her estate, where in like case a few months earlier she would have asked him wonderingly what she had to do with things planned and accomplished by him. She expressed acquiescence as one might who has the right to approve or to criticise, where before she would have concerned herself only with rejoicings that her guardian had got things as he wanted them, in accordance with his unquestioned and unquestionable right to have everything as he wanted it to be in a world quite unworthy of him.