Leonard did not suspect this arrest, so to speak, of development. He assumed that the maiden’s heart had advanced _pari passu_ with his. He wrote a letter, therefore, a method of wooing which is less embarrassing than that of speech--I believe that girls prefer the latter. Certainly, it is difficult to be glowing in a letter; nor, if there should be any doubt, is a letter so persuasive as the voice, aided by the pressure of the hand and the ardour of the eye. “MY DEAR FRIEND, “I am about to imperil a situation the preservation of which is my greatest happiness. You have allowed me to talk to you freely about my cherished ambitions. You have even done me the honour of consulting me about your own. I would not throw away this position of confidence for any consideration whatever. Let me, however, venture to put before you a simple question. I ask you to consider the possibility of a change in this situation. This change--there is only one which we can consider--would not in any way affect this confidence, but should draw it more closely. How it would affect me I will tell you if you allow me. “Your friend, “L. C.” Not a loverlike letter at all, is it? Yet there were possibilities about it. You see, he held out the hope that more would be told. The young lady answered by asking a few days for consideration. She was to send or bring her reply that morning. Constance knocked at the door. She came in from her rooms without a hat. She took a chair--Leonard’s own wooden chair--and sat down, beginning to talk about other things, as if such a matter as a proposal of marriage was of no importance. But that was only her way, which was always feminine. “I was told last night,” she said, “at the club--fancy, at the club!--that I have been compromising myself by dining night after night with you and letting you walk home with me. That is their idea of woman’s liberty. She is not to form friendships. Don’t abuse our members. Pray remember, Leonard, that I do not in the least mind what they say.” At the first glance at her face, one could understand that this girl was not in the least alarmed as to what women might say of her. It was a proud face. There are many kinds of pride--she might have been proud of her family, had she chosen that form; or of her intellect and attainments; or of her beauty--which was remarkable. She was not proud in any such way; she had that intense self-respect which is pride of the highest kind. “She was a woman, therefore, to be wooed,” but the wooer must meet and equal that intense self-respect. This pride made her seem cold. Everybody thought her intensely cold. Leonard was perhaps the only man who knew by a thousand little indications that she was very far from cold. The pose of her head, the lines of the mouth, the intellectual look in her eyes, the clear-cut regularity of her features, proclaimed her pride and seemed to proclaim her coldness.