Love is the début of a woman’s soul from the darkness under Adam’s left ribs into the sunshine of the Garden of Eden and his presence. It is heavenly, but very much like a major operation attended by convulsions, and I am going to write you the whole truth about it, my dear Evelyn, and not present to you an unadorned feminine version. It is going to be hard, for I’ve only been practising concise veracity for a little over a month, and if I am crude in places, you must forgive me. What did it? Aunt Grace, my unfilial virago of a disposition, and the will of God. Please don’t let it make you uncomfortable to have me speak of Him in this friendly fashion, for He is in the story, and I can’t help it. Besides, that is part of what I want to tell you about. The first of May, mother came home from a visit to Aunt Grace in Louisville with the most peculiar little man led by a halter for me. He has a title, genuine brand. Elizabeth Gentry is going to marry him now, and she’ll write you all about it. Aunt Grace had selected him in Rome at Easter, and told him the round numbers of the fortune Grandmother Wickliffe left me. She had instructed mother minutely as to my joyous and appreciative course of action toward him, and you know how my maternal parent is about Aunt Grace. I want to record it of father that he received the duke with a recoil, and went to New Orleans the next morning for an indefinite stay. Of course the little man is a human being, but I consider the United States as fortunate that it is not now in complications with Italy over the murder of one of her scions by an enraged Tennessee woman. Two days after his arrival, and only several hours after the first time he tried to possess his funny little paws of my very garden-burned hand, I packed a few of my belongings in three trunks and a steamer-bag and departed to find Dudley. He is such a perfectly satisfactory brother that, since my earliest youth, I have always felt it best to flee to him when I feel a tantrum coming on. They don’t disturb the even tenor of his life in the least. “Oh, Nell!” was all mother had the courage to say, when so far away from Aunt Grace, at the announcement of my intention. “My brother is ill up in the Harpeth Hills, and _I_ must go to him,” was all I said to the duke. That was the feminine version of a line in Dudley’s last letter, saying he had caught a heavy cold sleeping out without his blanket while with one of his gangs marking lumber on Old Harpeth. But I did take his grace to call on Elizabeth before I departed. I will say that much for myself.