"I think so, too," said Miggy, simply, "I was afraid you wouldn't." "Have you ever been anybody's secretary?" I continued. "Never," said Miggy. "I never saw anybody before that had a secretary." "But something must have made her think you would do," I suggested. "And what made you think so?" "Well," Miggy said, "she thinks so because she wants me to get ahead. And I think so because I generally think I can do anything--except mathematics. Has Secretary got any mathematics about it?" "Not my secretary work," I told her, reviewing these extraordinary qualifications for duty; "except counting the words on a page. You could do that?" "Oh, that!" said Miggy. "But if you told me to multiply two fractions you'd never see me again, no matter how much I wanted to come back. Calliope Marsh says she's always expecting to find some folks' heads caved in on one side--same as red and blue balloons. If mine caved, it'd be on the mathematics corner." I assured her that I never have a fraction in my house. "Then I'll come," said Miggy, simply. But immediately she leaned forward with a look of anxiety, and her face was pointed and big-eyed, so that distress became a part of it. "Oh," she said, "I _forgot_. I meant to tell you first." "What is it? Can you not come, after all?" I inquired gravely. "I've got a drawback," said Miggy, soberly. "A man's in love with me." She linked her arms before her, a hand on either shoulder--arms whose slenderness amazes me, though at the wrist they taper and in their extreme littleness are yet round. Because of this frailty she has a kind of little girl look which at that moment curiously moved me. "Who told you that?" I asked abruptly. "About it being a drawback? Everybody 'most," said Miggy. "They all laugh about us and act like it was a pity." For a moment I felt a kind of anger as I felt it once when a woman said to me of a wife of many years whose first little child was coming, that she was "in trouble." I own that,--save with my neighbour, and Calliope, and a few more whom I love--here in the village I miss the simple good breeding of the perception that nothing is nobler than the emotions, and the simple good taste of taking seriously love among its young. Taking it seriously, I say. Not, heaven forbid, taking it for granted, as do the cities. "Other things being equal, I prefer folk who are in love," I told Miggy. Though I observe that I instance a commercialization which I deplore by not insisting on this secretarial qualification to anything like the extent with which I insist on, say, spelling. Miggy nodded--three little nods which seemed to settle everything. "Then I'll come," she repeated. "Anyhow, it isn't me that's in love at all. It's Peter. But of course I have to have some of the blame."