I have seen a young, untried race-horse with small, pointed, restless ears; with delicate nostrils where the red blood showed; with full, soft eyes where fire flashed; with a satin skin so thin and glossy that even the lightest hand would cause it to quiver to the touch; where pride and fire and royal blood seemed to urge a trial of their powers; and I have thought: "You are capable of passing anything on the track and coming under the wire triumphant and victorious; or you might fulfil your prophecy equally well by falling dead in your first heat, with the red blood gushing from those thin nostrils. We can be sure of nothing until you are tried, but it is a quivering delight to look at you and to share your impatience and to wonder what you will do." Occasionally I see women who affect me in the same way--idealists, capable of being wounded through their sensitiveness by things which we ordinary mortals accept philosophically; capable also of greater heights of happiness and lower depths of misery, but of suffering most through being misunderstood. To this class Rachel and Louise belong. Rachel, in Percival, has reached a haven where she rides at anchor, sheltered from such storms as had hitherto almost engulfed her, and growing more heroically beautiful in character day by day. Poor Louise is still at sea, with a great storm brewing. How hard, how terribly hard, to talk to Charlie Hardy about her, when, after the solemnity of an engagement tie between them, he was capable of misunderstanding, not only her, but the whole situation so blindly! But what a calamity it would be if Louise should marry him! "Go on, Ruth. Say something, do. I imagine all sorts of things while you just sit there looking at me so solemnly. I realize that I am in a tight place. I did hope that you could see some way out of it for me; but I know, by the way you act, that you think I ought to give up Frankie--dear little girl!--and marry Louise, and by Jove! if you say it's the handsome thing to do, I'll do it." This still more effectually closed my lips. He so evidently thought that he was being heroic. He added rather reluctantly, "I must say that I suppose Frankie Taliaferro would get over it much more easily than Louise could." "Charlie," I said slowly, "you don't mean to be, but you are too conceited to live. I wonder that you haven't died of conceit before this." Charlie's blond face flushed and he looked deeply offended. "Conceited!" he burst out. "Why, Ruth, there isn't a fellow going who has a worse opinion of himself than I have. I don't see what either of those girls sees in me to love, I tell you. I am not proud of it. I wish to Heaven they didn't love me. _I_ haven't made them."