the contrary, which is never carried out by the ladies nowadays. My dear dear, I shall be afraid to look at you. They tell me you are so different from what you were. And I get long wrinkles up and down my forehead, if I ever allow myself to think of it; and though I try not to do it, it will come back again. But never mind; you will be as strong as ever when you have a good kiss from “Your own Kitty.” “Well, I call that something like a true love-letter;” my Aunt Parslow said, when she had contrived almost to compel me to show it to her, which I did not feel sure that I had any right to do. “That’s a true woman, though I never saw her. She thinks of you ten times as much as of herself; and no man can pretend to say that he repays it; even when he happens to deserve it; which has never happened to any gentleman I knew. You write, and you talk, and you go on with fine words, till people who listen to you believe, that you mean to give up your own ways altogether. And perhaps you do believe it, at the time, for you never know your own minds at all. But about three days of it—that’s all there is. I know it from friends of my own; though, thank God, I had sense enough never to try it myself. And then it is, ‘Mary, could you fill my pipe? It would be so sweet, dear, if you did it!’ Or—‘Louisa, I must have left my handkerchief upstairs. Did you happen to notice where I put it, dear?’ And she is fool enough to run for it, and kisses him on the bottom step; and her life is a treadmill afterwards. Your Kitty is quite of that sort, mind. I can see it in every word she writes.” “Well, Aunt Parslow, and you would have been the same, if any gentleman had had the luck to offer you upon his altar.” “I believe I should,” she answered, with a snap at first; and then she smiled slowly, and said, “No doubt I should, Kit. But try to be no worse than you can help with her.” If anything can rouse a lover’s indignation—and there are too many things that do so—such a calm assumption of his levity and ferocity is the first to set it boiling. “What are you thinking of?” I asked, without even adding, “Aunt Parslow.” “I am pleased to see you in that state of mind,” she continued; when gratitude alone preserved me, without even a half-glance at her twenty thousand pounds, from the murderous speech that was on my tongue. “But you are very young, Kit. You will come to know better, when you have had enough of this sweet Kitty. Enough very soon becomes too much. And then what do you do? You neglect them, and think that you are very good indeed, if you do no worse.” Miss Parslow was not at all a spiteful woman; even too much the other way, if that can be. And of such things she could have no experience, because she had never risked it. But being deeply hurt, I said—“You know best.”