give it for you in racy and eager fashion, turning up great layers of her own life and of those she knew about her. Many demons were thus sent flying. Her exorcisms have been gained by a blazing candor and by a self-directed sense of humor which alone can support it. With the white light of this lantern she seems to have hunted down all the evil shadows in that background of hers. Her relentless exposure of her own motives, her eager publicity of soul and that fascinating life which is hers, her gossip without malice and her wise cynicism, make Sophronisba the greatest of reliefs from a world too full of decent reticences and self-respects. That heavy conscience has been trained down to an athletic trimness. I cannot find an interest or a realism or a self-interpretation at which she will cringe, though three centuries of Puritanism in her blood should tell her how unhallowed most of them are. Sophronisba, naturally, is feminist to the core. Particularly on the subject of the economic servitude of married women does she grow very tense, and if anywhere her sense of humor deserts her it is here. But she is so convincing that she can throw me into a state of profound depression, from which I am not cheered by reflecting how unconscious of their servitude most of these women are. Sophronisba herself is a symbol of triumphant spinsterhood rejoicing the heart, an unmarried woman who knows she would make a wretched wife and does not seem to mind. Her going home once a year to see her family has epic quality about it. She parts from her friends with a kind of resigned daring, and returns with the air of a Proserpine from the regions of Pluto. To have laid all these ghosts of gloom and queerness and fear which must have darkened her prim and neglected young life, is to have made herself a rarely interesting woman. I think the most delightful bohemians are those who have been New England Puritans first. MON AMIE I She was French from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet, but she was of that France which few Americans, I think, know or imagine. She belonged to that France which Jean-Christophe found in his friend Olivier, a world of flashing ideas and enthusiasms, a golden youth of ideals. She had picked me out for an exchange of conversation, as the custom is, precisely because I had left my name at the Sorbonne as a person who wrote a little. I had put this bait out, as it were, deliberately, with the intention of hooking a mind that cared for a little more than mere chatter, but I had hardly expected to find it in the form of a young girl who, as she told me in her charmingly polished note, was nineteen and had just completed her studies.