This all looks promising, to my romantic mind; for the beginning of all kinds of affection, physical, mental, and spiritual, that are huddled together in varying proportions as component parts of love, has its origin in dependence. Father declares independence, selfishness, and aloofness to be the trinity of hell. Now Martin Cortright has come to depend upon Lavinia Dorman's opinion, and she is beginning not only to realize and enjoy his dependence, but to aid and abet it. Is not this symptomatic? When I approach father upon the Latham affair, he says that he thinks the rupture was inevitable from the point of view and conditions that existed. He feels, from the evidence that long experience with the inner life of households has given him, that though a thoughtless woman may be brought to realize, and a woman with really bad inherited instincts reclaimed, through love, the wholly selfish woman of Mrs. Latham's type remains immovable to word of God or man, and is unreachable, save through the social code of the class that forms her world, and this code sanctions both the marriage and the divorce of convenience, and receives the results equally with open arms. As to the effect upon Sylvia, father exhibits much concern, and no little anxiety, for he has read her as a nature in some respects old for her twenty-one years, and in others, the side of the feminine, wholly young and unawakened, so that this jar, he thinks, comes at a most critical moment. He has a pretty theory that the untroubled heart of a young girl is like a vessel full of the fresh spring sap of the sugar maple that is being freed by slow fire from its crudities and condensed to tangible form. When a certain point is reached, it is ready to crystallize about the first object that stirs it ever so lightly, irrespective of its quality: this is first love. But if the condensing process is lingering, no jar disturbing it prematurely until, as it reaches perfection, the vital touch suddenly reaches its depths, then comes real love, perfected at first sight, clinging everlastingly to the object, love that endures by its own strength, not by mere force of habit; and this love belongs only to the heart's springtime, before full consciousness has made it speculative. * * * * * When Horace Bradford drove homeward the afternoon of the fête, he was in a brown study, having no realization of time or place until the wise horse turned in at the barnyard gate, and after standing a moment by his usual hitching post, looked over his shoulder and gave a whinny to attract his master's attention. Then Horace started up, shook off his lethargy, and hurried to the porch, where his mother stood waiting, to give her the roses, and Sylvia's message.