"Mamma," said she, "it has just occurred to me that perhaps it is my duty--_my duty_--to marry this misguided man. Three women have already fallen victims to him--but not one was an American. I believe, from the very depths of my soul, that, if a really clever American girl should take hold of him, she could make him a model husband. Yes," cried Theodora, warming with her own eloquence, and beginning again to march up and down, "look at Sir Roger MacTurk. Wasn't he a perfect terror until he got a wife from New York?--and now I believe he would play the concertina if Lady MacTurk told him to. And Lord Cantantram--everybody knows how that soft-voiced little thing from the South dragoons him. Oh, I can tell you, when an Englishman marries an American he doesn't have any bed of roses. Of course they don't let on--that's their British pluck--and they do fib in the most manly and splendid way about it all--but I think an Englishman married to an American girl, and who lives and dies a Christian, ought to be painted with a nimbus around his head. Yes, I do. Anne, don't glower at me in that way. Now, an Englishman, for all he is so big and brave, can't resist an American girl when she looks at him this way." Here Theodora paused, quite breathless, threw up her head, and assumed an air that might well make a six-footer shake in his shoes. These observations seemed to nettle Mrs. Wodehouse somewhat. "I remember Colonel Cairngorm telling me--" began she. "Colonel Cairngorm!" cried Theodora, throwing up her hands in a paroxysm of despair that would have made her fortune at the Comédie Française. "You needn't laugh at him," responded Mrs. Wodehouse tartly; and then, with a slight blush, she added: "It is not impossible that--in fact--to be very confidential--he proposed last week; I've got it under consideration--he is certainly a very pleasant person." "Yes," agreed Theodora candidly, "he is a nice man--but he does make the greatest gaby of himself when he is in the act of proposing I ever saw in my life, and I've heard half a dozen girls say the same thing." The look in Theodora's eye said as plainly as could be, "Aha! we are quits for what you have said of Sir John Blood"; and for Mrs. Wodehouse, the iron had entered her soul. "And I think," continued Theodora, with an air of profound philosophy, "that the art of proposing is a gift with some men, and others, like Colonel Cairngorm, can't acquire it even after much practice. I recollect he made me perfectly ill on the occasion." Mrs. Wodehouse had always thought American girls too nimble of wit, and was more than ever convinced of it then. "Theo," began Anne, timidly, "for a woman who loves, there is a certain glorious kind of slavery, says Wil--" Theodora dashed at her sister and good-naturedly boxed her ears and touzled her hair.