'No, no--it is quite clear, thank you. Kindly go on endeavoring, then, to influence my unhappy child for good. I trust your excellent father is well. Good morning.' But influence as I may Vicki has given up wearing those starched shirts with the high linen collars and neat ties in which she first dazzled me, and has gone into nondescript woollen clothes something like mine. She says it is because, of the washing bills, but I know it to be but a further symbol of her despair. The one remnant of her first trimness is her beautifully brushed hair. Stooping over her to see that her English exercises are correct I like to lay my cheek a moment on it, so lightly that she does not notice, for it is wonderful stuff,--soft, wavy, shining, and ought alone without the little ear and curve of the young cheek, without the silly pretty mouth and kind straightforward eyes, to have immeshed that stupid man beyond all possibility of disentangling himself. She was not made for Milton and the Muses. Nature, carving her out, moulding her body and her mind, putting in a dimple here and giving an eyelash an extra curl there, had a pleasant eye on a firelit future for Vicki, a cosy, sheltered future with a fender for her feet, a baby for each arm, and an adored husband coming in at the end of the day to be fed and kissed. But this man has outwitted nature. He weighed, with true German caution, Vicki and her dimples against the tiny portion which was all he could extract from her parents, and found them not heavy enough to make up for the alarming emptiness of that other scale. Now Vicki's fender and babies and busy happy life have vanished into the land of Never Will Be's. She will not find some one else to take his place. She has a story attached to her: a fatal thing here for a girl. Unlike your Miss Cheriton, who gently waves you aside and engages herself without the least difficulty to a duke, Vicki is a marked person, and will be avoided by our careful and calculating young men. She is doomed never to spoil and tease those babies, never to spoil and worship that husband. Instead she will, for a year, continue to range the hills here with me, trying to listen politely to my admonishments while inwardly she shudders at the loneliness and vastness of the forests and of life, and then her parents' lease will be up, and they and she will drift down into some little town in the Harz where retired officers finish lives grown vegetable, and the years will pounce upon her and strip her one by one of her little stock of graces. Don't suppose I blame the man, because I don't; I only resent that he should have so much the best of it. There is no law obliging a man to marry because some lovesick girl wants him to--if I were a man I would never marry--but I do deplore the exceeding number of the girls who want him to. If each girl would say her prayers and go her own way, go about her business, her parents having seen to it that she should have a business