A STRANGE MARRIAGE. When Percy returned to his apartments he found a letter from Helena awaiting him. It was written in reply to his, posted to her before leaving Centerville. His head was aching, and his vision blurred strangely as he read the written words. It began without an address, abruptly. "I, too, have worshiped an ideal all my life. A man without reproach, and above dishonor. A man strong in all manly attributes, strong in his loves and his emotions, but strong, too, in his pride, and in his will power. I think God never bestows the one without the other; but man too often cultivates the former and leaves the latter unused. For the ideal I so worshiped, I kept my heart free and my soul unsullied. When you came, all unconsciously I invested you with the attributes of my ideal. All unconsciously--until too late to place a guard upon my unwise heart--it poured out its long-hidden treasures. So suddenly the knowledge came upon me, that I betrayed to you what had been wiser to conceal. Wiser, because added to the Creator's uneven distribution of pains and penalties, the world bestows its merciless condemnation upon the woman who reveals that which is so difficult to hide. God formed man and woman out of the self-same clay! breathed into their bodies the self-same breath of life--endowed them with the self-same human nature. But a civilized Society permits man to exult in a display of the emotions which it demands that woman shall mask or deny. Upon the weaker being devolves the double duty of fighting against the aggressive impulses of the stronger, while she controls her own. She who fails to do this, loses the esteem of the man who has awakened the slumbering passions of her heart. That I love you, I will not attempt to deny. I think God meant us for each other in the beginning. But I give much to the man I love, when I give myself, penniless and nameless though I am, I give a whole heart, untouched by any belittling half-loves or debasing jealousies. While I have waited for the coming of the King, I have allowed no pretender to occupy the throne in my heart, even for an hour. I have given no man on earth the right to think I loved him, until you came. No man exists who can point his hand at me and say, 'we were lovers once.' Has not she who gives a stainless womanhood, a pure, wholesome body, and a true, warm heart, the right to demand much in return? She either undervalues her own worth, or overvalues the worth of any man, it seems to me, who does not demand it.