As Mrs. Buzzell was watering her house plants, a few days after the visit of the doctor’s wife, a letter arrived for her, and her eyes brightened, seeing the doctor’s handwriting in the superscription. She was very familiar with this handwriting, not from letters, indeed—nothing so romantic, but from his manifold medical prescriptions for her dyspepsia. There was no person in the world she esteemed so highly as she did Dr. Forest, and receiving a letter from him was a rare delight; yet she did not open it at once, but kept on tending her plants, which occupied a large table before the south window of her sitting-room. She did not open it hastily, probably for the same reason that has led many of us on receiving several letters, to leave the specially coveted one until the last, or perhaps until we were quite at ease and alone. At all events, Mrs. Buzzell waited until the flowers were all watered, and the stray drops of water fallen on the square of oiled cloth beneath the table carefully wiped up. Then she sat down, put on her gold-bowed spectacles, opened her letter, and read: “MY DEAR MRS. BUZZELL: I have wormed out of my wife this evening the object and the result of her late visit to you. I can quite understand, as I told her, why you should have refused her request. “Now, you two women have danced in pint-pots all your lives, but with this difference: you, because the tether of your education and surroundings never permitted you to examine principles and motives of action outside of a given circumference; she, because the pint-pot fits her like a glove, and she measures the harmony of the spheres by this beautiful fit. She has never tried to breathe the broader, freer atmosphere outside, because her theory is, the pint-pot first and the universe afterward. “By the pint-pot you know I mean society. Mrs. Forest sees plainly that no devotee of conventional morality can stand by a girl, especially one who is poor and humble in social position, and give her moral support through disgrace, without being ‘talked about’—that bugbear of little souls. Fools will say it is countenancing vice. I appeal to you because, from many sentiments I have heard you utter, I believe you capable of defying shallow criticism when you know you are right. I know you have broad and generous impulses, and you are young enough in soul and in body [this was a Bismarckian stroke of diplomacy, but the honest doctor never knew it] to obey them. You are the mother of no human child, but childless women should be the mothers of the world—sad for all its sorrows, glad for all its joys.