With boyish frankness they would tell her of these things; they told her all they thought about her. I have never heard of men who dealt so frankly in personalities, who would discuss a woman and her various “points” so openly to her face. “Miss Sylvia, you look like all your roses to-night.”—“Miss Sylvia, I swear you’ve got the loveliest eyes in the world!”—“You’ll be fading soon now; you’d better marry while you’ve got a chance!”—“I came to see if you were as pretty as they say, Miss Castleman!” She would laugh merrily. “Are you disappointed? Don’t you find me ado’able?” So far I have made no attempt to give you an idea of Sylvia’s way of speaking English. It was a drawl so charming that Miss Abercrombie had given instructions not to mar it by rash corrections. I can only mention a few of her words—which is as if I gave you single hairs out of her golden glory. She always spoke of “cannles.” She could, of course, make nothing of the letter r, and said “funnichuh” and “que-ah” and “befo-ah mawnin’.” There had been an English heiress at Miss Abercrombie’s who had won the whole school over to “gel,” but when Sylvia arrived, she swept the floor with “go-il.” The most irresistible word of all I thought was “bug;” there is no way to indicate this by spelling—you must simply take three times as long to say it, lingering over the vowel sound, caressing it as if you thought that “bu-u-u-gs” were the most “ado’able” things in all the “wo’il.” Sylvia learned to apply with deadly effect the maxim of Lady Dee—that a woman’s sharpest weapon is her _naïveté_. “Beware of me!” she would warn her helpless victims. “Haven’t you heard that I’m a coquette? No, I’m not joking. It’s something I’m bitterly ashamed of, but I can’t help it; I’m a cold-hearted, selfish creature, a deliberate breaker of hearts.” And then, of course, the victim would thrill with excitement and exclaim, “See what you can do to me, Miss Sylvia! I’ll send you armfuls of roses if you can break my heart!” You may judge how these competitions ended from a chance remark which Sylvia made to me—“When I look back upon my life, it seems to me that I waded in a river of roses.” The only protection which nature has vouchsafed against these terrors is the fact that sooner or later such cold and cruel huntresses themselves get snared. In the simile of “Sterne’s starling,” they are lured up to a certain cage, and after much hopping about and hesitating, much advancing and retreating, much chattering and chirping, they adorn themselves in satin robes and lace veils and lilies-of-the-valley, and to the sound of sweet strains from “Lohengrin” they enter the golden cage. And then, snap! the door is shut and locked fast, and the proprietor of the cage mounts guard over it—in Sylvia’s part of the world with a shotgun in his hands. § 10