“You’ll perhaps be interested to hear that a proposal of marriage was made to me last night. The bold adventurer is rather like your Pa,--well ‘on’ in years, rich, with a prosperous ‘tum’--and a general aspect of assertive affluence. I said ‘No,’ of course, and he asked me if I knew what I was doing? Exactly as if he thought I might be drunk, or dreaming! I replied that I was quite aware of myself, of him, and the general locality. ‘And yet you say No?’ he almost whispered, in a kind of stupefied amazement. I repeated ‘No’--and ‘No,’--and clinched the matter by the additional remark that he was the last sort of man I would ever wish to marry. Then he smiled feebly, and said ‘Poor child!--you have been sadly led astray! These new ideas----’ I cut him short by ringing the bell and ordering tea, and fortunately just at the moment in came Jane Prowser--_you_ know her!--the tall, bony woman who goes in for ‘Eugenics,’ and she did the scarecrow business quite effectively. As soon as she began to talk in her high, rasping voice he went! Then I had tea alone with the Prowser--rather a trying meal, as she would, she _would_ describe in detail all the deformities and miseries of a child ‘wot ’adn’t no business to be born,’ as my housemaid once remarked of a certain domestic upset. However, I got rid of her after she had eaten all the cress and tomato sandwiches, and then I started to read a batch of letters from abroad. I’m so thankful for my foreign correspondents!--they write and spell so well, and always have something interesting to say. One of my great friends in Paris, Blanche de Rouailles, sent me a most curious advertisement, which she tells me is appearing in all the French papers--I enclose it for you, as you are so ‘scientific’ and it may interest you. It is rather curiously worded and sounds ‘uncanny!’ But it occupies nearly half a column in all the principal Paris papers and is repeated in five different languages,--French, Italian, Spanish, Russian and English. I suppose it’s a snare or a ‘do’ of some sort. The world is full of scoundrels, even in science! Now remember what I tell you! Come to me at once if Pa and Ma kick over the traces and allow their ingrained selfishness to break out of bounds. There’s plenty of room for you in my cosy little flat and we can have a real good time together. Don’t bother about money,--with your talent and knowledge of languages you can soon earn some, and I’ll put you in the way of it. You really must do something for your own advantage,--surely you don’t mean to waste your whole life in soothing Pa and massaging Ma? It may be dutiful but it must be dull! I don’t think all the massaging in the world will ever reduce Ma to normal proportions, and certainly nothing can ever cure Pa of his detestable humours which are always lurking in ambush below his surface ‘manner,’ ready to jump out like little black devils on the smallest provocation. We can never be