"You can't explain it, you just accept it--just as you accept sunshine and rain--you can't explain any more than you can describe. And she's the sort of woman that all of us who dwell within this house will go on all the rest of our lives trying to describe and I'll bet that not all of us put together can tell more'n half that there is to tell about her. Why, her very faults are different than other people's faults! She has a pippin of a temper and such stub-stub-stubborn ways! Don't you think Thad's cartoons of 'Temperamental Therese' are peaches? Well, they are nothing but Felice in her illogical crotchety unfair minutes--Thad says the only way to explain such heavenly rudeness as Felicia's is to remember that she began being rude in 1817--" "How old is she?" I fairly shouted, "Oh, please get down to earth and tell me something definite about her! You're perfectly maddening!" The girl jumped lightly to the floor and slipped across the room to swing the casement in the north wall and let me peer down into Felicia's garden. If you'll look on the back of your envelope you can see just how it was, just how the walls shut off the rectory yard. "She's exactly twenty-seven," she sighed, "the most perfect age to be! And if you were really going to tell her story you wouldn't have to go back all the way to 1817, you'd begin it about--well, let me see-- you'd begin it about 1897, I think, and right down there in that wee little garden. And of course you'd begin it with her whistling. And you'd ask anybody you were trying to tell about her whether they'd ever heard Mademoiselle Folly whistle--" Did you? For if you have, I'm sure you've never forgotten the droll way that Mademoiselle Folly stepped out upon a stage in her quaint green frock and made her frightened curtsy. Can you recall her low contralto drawl and her inevitable, "Oh, my dears, I do _so_ hope that you're going to be good at pretending! You all of you look as though you could pretend if you just started! So let's you and I pretend that--"