MY DEAR AUGUSTA (Maria Spalding wrote): I am going to ask you to help me out of a _difficulty_. There is no _use_ beating about the bush. You know that Cynthia's daughter Robinetta (Loring is her _married_ name) has been with me for a month. _American_ or no _American_, I meant to have had her for a part of the season, and to _present_ her, if possible (so _good_ for these Americans to learn what royalty _is_ and to breathe the atmosphere which doth hedge a _King_ as Shakespeare says, and which they can never _have_, of course, in a country like theirs). I know you can't _approve_, dear Augusta, and you will blame me for sentimentality--but I never _can_ forget what a _sweet_ creature Cynthia was before she ran away with that odious American--and my _greatest_ friend in girlhood, too, you must remember. So Robinette, as she is generally called, has come to my house as a _home_, but a most _unlucky_ thing has happened. I have had influenza so badly that it has affected my _heart_ (an old trouble), I am ordered to Nauheim, and Robinette is _stranded_, poor dear. She has few friends in London and certainly none who can put her up. Tho' she _is_ a widow, she is only twenty-two (just _imagine_!), very pretty, and really, tho' you won't believe it, _quite_ nice. I am _desperate_, and just wondering if you would let by-gones be by-gones, and receive her at Stoke Revel. She has set her heart upon seeing the place, and some _picture_ she was called after (I can't remember it, so it can't be one of the _famous_ Stoke Revel group--a _copy_, I fancy), and on paying a visit to Lizzie Prettyman, her mother's old nurse at Wittisham over the river. She _promised_ her mother she would do this--and such a promise is _sacred_, don't you think? It's such an _old_ story now, Cynthia's American marriage, and no fault of _Robinette's_, poor dear child. Her wish is almost a _pious_ one, don't you agree, to pay respect to her mother's memory and the family, and is _much_ to be encouraged in these days of radicalism, when every natural tie is loosened and people pay no more _respect_ to their parents than if they hadn't any, but had made themselves and brought themselves up from the beginning. So don't you think it's a _good_ thing to encourage the _right_ kind of feeling in Robinette, especially as she is an _American_, you know.... * * * * * Mrs. de Tracy paused, and replaced the letter in the package from which she had withdrawn it. "Maria Spalding's point of view," she observed, "has, I confess, helped me to overcome the extreme reluctance I felt to receive the child of that American here. Cynthia de Tracy's elopement nearly broke my dear husband's heart. She was the apple of his eye before our marriage; so much younger than himself that she was like his child rather than his sister."