"I am twenty-two years old!" the letter went on. "As a young girl I knew nothing of city life. My father owned a sheep ranch in the Northwest, and there I grew up, roaming about as freely as the sheep themselves. I learned to ride and to shoot. Until I was a woman grown, I never took a needle in my hand. Perhaps it may seem strange to you, but out of this aloofness from feminine pursuits there grew up within me a sort of reverence for the feminine ideal. I felt a vague awe, such as I imagine strikes a man at sight of a rose-lined parasol, or a thimble laid on a pile of stitchery. It is this sense of the poetry of women's occupation which must give what little value they possess to my verses; and perhaps you will not care for any more now that you know they are no part of the real _me_, but only an ideal." The letter was signed "Amy Bell," and the only address given, a New York post-office box. "A pretty name," said Flint to himself, as he studied it, "a very pretty name!" Then he fell to musing on how this girl must look; and he found himself making a likeness from the picture over the mantel, only he would have the face a trifle rounder, with a dimple in either cheek, and a hint more of tenderness in that firm under-lip, whose smile savored of delicate irony. His thoughts unconsciously reverted to the reflections of the morning, as he looked at the portrait. "How shy we all are of self-revelation!" he murmured, as he folded the letter slowly, and slid it into his vest-pocket; "and then, when we have gone about for years hedging ourselves in with barriers of ice, suddenly some emotion thaws them, and out flow all the tides of feeling which we have been damming up so long." Flint's musings ended in a determination to answer this letter, and to answer it now while the genial mood was on him. The writer had taken pains to give little clue to her identity. Well, he would answer her from behind the same veil of impersonality. She need never know how widely she had missed her guess in her picture of him. She might keep her poor little illusions--yes, "elderly gentleman" and all. He would speak to her, as one soul might speak to another, unhampered by all the trammels of outward circumstance. It was his to offer help, sympathy, encouragement, and he dispensed it in no stinted measure.