WHEN now I was rich with double millions, I became harrowed of new thoughts and sown with new ambitions. It was Blossom to lie at the roots of it--Blossom, looking from her window of young womanhood upon a world she did not understand, and from which she drew away. The world was like a dark room to Blossom, with an imagined fiend to harbor in every corner of it. She must go forth among people of manners and station. The contact would mend her shyness; with time and usage she might find herself a pleasant place in life. Now she lived a morbid creature of sorrow which had no name--a twilight soul of loneliness--and the thought of curing this went with me day and night. Nor was I unjustified of authority. “Send your daughter into society,” said that physician to whom I put the question. “It will be the true medicine for her case. It is her nerves that lack in strength; society, with its dinners and balls and fêtes and the cheerful hubbub of drawing rooms, should find them exercise, and restore them to a complexion of health.” Anne did not believe with that savant of nerves. She distrusted my society plans for Blossom. “You think they will taunt her with the fact of me,” I said, “like that one who showed her the ape cartoon as a portrait of her father. But Blossom is grown a woman now. Those whom I want her to meet would be made silent by politeness, even if nothing else might serve to stay their tongues from such allusions. And I think she would be loved among them, for she is good and beautiful, and you of all should know how she owns to fineness and elevation.” “But it is not her nature,” pleaded Anne. “Blossom would be as much hurt among those men and women of the drawing rooms as though she walked, barefooted, over flints.” For all that Anne might say, I persisted in my resolve. Blossom must be saved against herself by an everyday encounter with ones of her own age. I had more faith than Anne. There must be kindness and sympathy in the world, and a countenance for so much goodness as Blossom's. Thus she should find it, and the discovery would let in the sun upon an existence now overcast with clouds. These were my reasonings. It would win her from her broodings and those terrors without cause, which to my mind were a kind of insanity that might deepen unless checked. Full of my great design, I moved into a new home--a little palace in its way, and one to cost me a penny. I cared nothing for the cost; the house was in the center of that region of the socially select. From this fine castle of gilt, Blossom should conquer those alliances which were to mean so much for her good happiness. Being thus fortunately founded, I took Morton into my confidence. He was a patrician by birth and present station; and I knew I might have both his hand and his wisdom for what was in my heart. When I laid open my thought to Morton, he stood at gaze like one planet-struck, while that inevitable eyeglass dropped from his amazed nose.