"Of course; but I mean the women who have been brought up as I have been. I've always had everything I wanted, and my parents have protected me against everything. They even protest when I rebel against my own uselessness by going into settlement work, and in other small ways try to express my individuality." "Such as the course in bookbinding with Cobden-Sanderson?" Merry smiled consciously. "That was such a poor attempt, because I had no ability. My squares were uneven, my backs were wrinkled, and it was really such sloppy work." "Granting that what you say is true, yet the experience gained in doing it enabled you to understand Hamlen to-day far better than if you had never attempted it. That is the main point, isn't it?" "I suppose nothing we do is ever wholly lost," she admitted. "I did understand Mr. Hamlen, but that understanding has brought me no nearer to the point where I can help him." "You helped him to-day more than any one has ever done except myself.--You see how frankly I accept first glory." "I helped him?" Merry protested. "Why, I only listened and allowed myself to be entertained." "Yes; but there is a difference in the way one does even that. He hesitated to show you his work and yet he wanted to show it to you. That was the struggle between the habit of years to restrain his real feeling and the desire which your sympathetic personality created in him. And the desire won out. Each time the habit is broken its power over him becomes weaker. Now do you see the value of the service you rendered him?" "It is wonderful how clearly you analyze things!" the girl exclaimed admiringly. "All I could see was depressing, but you found encouragement in everything." "Surely those beautiful books encouraged you?" "Yes; but they emphasized the awful pity of the deliberate repression of his full ability." "Still; the fact that the demand for expression was as stronger than the will to repress it shows the character beneath." "Then not to express one's individuality shows a lack of character?" Merry inquired soberly. "I think I sense some personal application," Huntington answered guardedly. "I must know more before I utter further words of wisdom." The girl looked up into his face inquiringly, and then laughed consciously. "I am really becoming frightened by your power to understand," she said, only half jokingly. "I do mean to make a personal application. I want to express myself individually, but, being a woman, I cannot find the opportunity. If I really had character I'm sure that I should force the opportunity." Huntington realized that in hesitating to answer her question he had been wiser than he knew. The seriousness which appeared from time to time on the girl's face, then, was not a passing mood, but rather the index of warring emotions. An unguarded word at this moment might do much injury to a nature which was striving to find itself.