Certainly there was neither childishness nor spirituality in the plain businesslike paper and strong, blunt handwriting that went to the composition of the letter. An almost breathless immediacy seemed also a distinctly [25] actuating factor in the task. As fast ever as hand could reach pen and pen could reach ink and ink could reach paper again the writer drove to his mark. To Miss Claudia Merriwayne, President, -------- College (said the letter). So it is you, dear Clytie Merriwayne, who have so peremptorily thus become the arbitrator of my family fame and fortunes? God Almighty! How Time flies! You, old enough to have a college. And I, old enough to have a daughter expelled from the same! Why did you do it, Clytie? Not have a college, I mean, but expel my daughter? Truly she seems to me like rather a nice little kid. And now I suppose in the cackle and comment of all concerned she stands forth "ruined" before the world. Yet when all's said and done, Clytie Merriwayne, who did the "ruining?" Not the little girl certainly. Most emphatically not that splendid boy! Who else then except yourself? Personally it would seem to me somehow at the moment as though you had bungled your college just [26] about as badly as I have bungled my daughter. My only conceivable excuse is that I've been a damned Ignoramus! What's yours? Here I had a fine, frank, clean, prankish little girl who didn't know a man from a woman, and you have changed her into a cowering, tortured, and altogether bewildered young recreant who never again, as long as time lasts, perhaps, will ever be able to tell a saint from a devil, or a lark from a lust, or a college president from any other traducer of youth and innocence. Yet you are considered to be something of a Specialist in girls, I should suppose. As well as once having been a girl yourself. How ever did you happen to do it, I say? How ever in the world did you happen to do it? "For discipline," of course you will most instantly affirm. "A necessary if drastic example to all the young lives in your charge. Youth being," as you will undoubtedly emphasize, "the formative period of character." It certainly is, Clytie! The simplest garden catalogue will tell you the same. Young things grow on the morning sun! That's the [27] phrase--everywhere. But don't ever forget, Clytie, that they blight just as easily on that selfsame sun! And if you have blighted my little girl instead of 'grown' her I shall not easily forgive you.