Your photographs, furnished as evidence of good faith in accordance with my requirements, lie before me as I write. Yours, Number 4 (the wife thoroughly happy in the wedded state), is suggestively typical of American womanhood. I have merely to utilize my mind's eye in order to behold you in the living flesh, tall, graceful, spare, and willowy; earnest and piquant in expression, with an air which suggests both the desire and the determination to accomplish great things, including no less a range than the probing of the secrets of the infinite, and the supplying of an ideal domestic dinner. Though willowy still, you have a plumper person than before you were married, and your face has lost the Amazonian tense look which it sometimes wore when you were a maid. Your eyes are bright with happiness, and a shrewd humor plays about the corners of your mouth; humor indicating, perhaps, that you find the world less sorry and more alluring than you did in the days when, grandly aspiring, but a little ignorant, cynical, and severe, you were waiting for an ideal lover to come and lift you from this humdrum, vulgar sphere to the stars. In other words, you have a drawing-room, such as it is, and a baby such as never was, and a husband whose faults (all of which you know) are more than balanced by his virtues, so that you are able to love him devotedly with your eyes open, and thus preserve your self-respect as an intelligent modern, and yet satisfy that primal need of your nature, the capacity for adoring affection. I see you thus in the living flesh, and I see you presently lost in engaging thought. You are saying to yourself some such words as these: "Everything is running smoothly. Alexander's (husband's name) affairs are on a satisfactory financial basis; baby is well, and has cut all her first teeth; the servants seem to be satisfied with us; and now is my chance to do something. What shall it be?" [_Note._--"Give an afternoon tea," ejaculated Josephine, to whom I was reading what I had written.]