"Upon reflection, I think we'd better not write to each other. You were too explicit in your letter--too precautionary. You'd make me have a conscience about it, and I'd be watching myself. That's too much trouble. My business is to watch others, not myself. But I do thank you for giving such a welcome to Honora and the babies. I hope you will soon be about again. I find it so much easier to imagine you riding over a mountain pass than sitting in the house with a leg in plaster. "Yours sincerely, "KATE BARRINGTON." He wrote back:-- "MY DEAR MISS BARRINGTON:-- "I admire your idea of gloom! Not the spirit of gloom but of adventure moves you. I saw it in your eye. When I buy a horse, I always look at his eye. It's not so much viciousness that I'm afraid of as stupidity. I like a horse that is always pressing forward to see what is around the next turn. Now, we humans are a good deal like horses. Women are, anyway. And I saw your eye. My own opinion is that you are having the finest time of anybody I know. You're shaping your own life, at least,--and that's the best fun there is,--the best kind of good fortune. Of course you'll get tired of it after a while. I don't say that because you are a woman, but I've seen it happen over and over again both with men and women. After a little while they get tired of roving and come home. "You may not believe it, but, after all, that's the great moment in their lives--you just take it from me who have seen more than you might think and who have had a good deal of time to think things out. I do wish you had seen your way to come out here. There are any number of matters I would like to talk over with you. "You mustn't think me impudent for writing in this familiar way. I write frankly because I'm sure you'll understand, and the conventionalities have been cast aside because in this case they seem so immaterial. I can assure you that I'm not impudent--not where women are concerned, at any rate. I'm a born lover of women, though I have been no woman's lover. I haven't seen much of them. Sometimes I've gone a year without seeing one, not even a squaw. But I judge them by my mother, who made every one happy who came near her, and by some others I have known; I judge them by you, though I saw you only a minute. I suppose you will think me crazy or insincere in saying that. I'm both sane and honest--ask Honora.