A lover does not view a rival kindly, but I am compelled to own that he is handsome. If I had the right to cavil, I could criticise only his mouth, which it seems to me has slyness with a certain cruel firmness; but I did not notice this until I knew him better, and perhaps it is only my imagination, born of later knowledge. I am not so blinded by my jealousy as to deny his perfect manner, for one feels the polished surface, touch the outside where one will. Your demeanor towards him was friendly, yet with all its graciousness it seemed to me to have a quality not so much of aloofness as of limit; conveying in an indefinable way the fact that such relations as then existed between you were the only possible ones. It was a shading so imperceptible that I do not think the Blodgetts realized it, and I should have questioned if Mr. Whitely himself were conscious of it, but for one or two things he said in the course of the evening, which had to me, under the veil of a general topic, individual suggestion. We were discussing that well-worn question of woman’s education, Mrs. Blodgett having introduced the apple of discord by a sweeping disapproval of college education for women, on the ground that it prevented their marrying. “They get to know too much, eh?” laughed Mr. Blodgett. “No,” cried Mrs. Blodgett, “they get to know too little! While they ought to be out in the world studying life and men, so as to choose wisely, they’re shut up in dormitories filling their brains with Greek and mathematics.” “You would limit a woman’s arithmetic to the solution of how to make one and one, one?” I asked, smiling. “Surely, Mrs. Blodgett, you do not mean that an uncultivated woman makes the best wife?” inquired Mr. Whitely. “I mean,” rejoined Mrs. Blodgett, “that women who know much of books know little of men. That’s why over-intellectual women always marry fools.” “How many intellectual wives there must be!” you said. “I shouldn’t mind if they only married fools,” continued Mrs. Blodgett, “but half the time they don’t marry at all.” “Does that prove or disprove their intellect?” you asked. “It means,” replied Mrs. Blodgett, “that they are so puffed up with their imaginary knowledge that they think no man good enough for them.” “I’ve known one or two college boys graduate with the same large ideas,” remarked Mr. Blodgett. “But a man gets over it after a few years,” urged Mrs. Blodgett, “and is none the worse off; but by the time a girl overcomes the idea, she’s so old that no man worth having will look at her.” “I rather think, Mrs. Blodgett,” said Mr. Whitely, in that charmingly deferential manner he has with women, “that some men do not try to win highly educated women because they are abashed by a sense of their own inferiority.” “Where do those men hide themselves, Whitely?” interrogated Mr. Blodgett. “I’ll not question the reason,” retorted Mrs. Blodgett. “The fact that over-educated girls think themselves above men is all I claim.”