She began to wonder what she had better do,--whether she should write John Ralston a long letter, explaining everything, or whether she should write him a short one, merely saying that the news was unfavourable--‘unfavourable’ sounded better than ‘bad’ or ‘disappointing,’ she thought--and asking him to come and see her in the afternoon. The latter course seemed preferable, and had, moreover, the advantage of involving fewer practical difficulties, for her command over her mother tongue was by no means very great when subjected to the test of black and white, though in conversation it was quite equal to her requirements on most occasions. She could even entirely avoid the use of slang, by making a determined effort, for her father detested it, and her mother’s conversational weaknesses were Southern and of a different type. But on paper she was never sure of being quite right. Punctuation was a department which she affected to despise, but which she inwardly feared, and when alone she admitted that there were words which she seemed to spell not as they were spelled in books--‘parallel,’ for instance, ‘psychology’ and ‘responsibility.’ She avoided those words, which were not very necessary to her, but with a disagreeable suspicion that there might be others. Had ‘develop’ an ‘e’ at the end of it, or had it not? She could never remember, and the dictionary lived in her grandfather’s den, at some distance from her own room. The difficulties of writing a long letter to John Ralston, whose mother had taught him his English before it could be taught him all wrong at a fashionable school, rose before her eyes with absurd force, and she decided forthwith to send for Ralston in the afternoon. Having come to a preliminary conclusion, life seemed momentarily a little easier. She turned out of her way into Fourth Avenue, took a horse-car, got transferred to a Christopher Street one, and in the course of time got out at the corner of Clinton Place. She wrote the shortest possible note to John Ralston, went out again, bought a special delivery stamp and took the letter up to the Thirteenth Street Post-Office--instead of dropping it into an ordinary letter-box. She did everything, in short, to make the message reach its destination as quickly as possible without employing a messenger.