DEAR AUNT,—If I have from time to time bothered you with my financial schemes I am very sorry. But I have an active brain, and too few briefs. Also I want to be in a sound financial position, and, under more favourable circumstances, most of my projects would, I am sure, succeed. But you are the only capitalist that I know, and just at the moment you are, I now realize, not in a position to take any deep interest in monetary ventures. I ought to have thought of this before, and I apologise. I write to you to-day for a very different purpose and that is, to enlist not your bank balance but your sympathy and, I hope, active help. In a nutshell, I want to marry Hazel. I have laid my case before her more than once, but she refuses to take me seriously. I am aware that I am not so superficially gay and insouciant as the majority of the young men of to-day; I know only too well that I cannot jazz and that I prefer dances where an intervening atmospheric space divides the partners. But, though I may be old-fashioned, surely I have compensating qualities of value in married life. What I feel is that if only Hazel could be persuaded that I am in deadly earnest, and that marriage is not one of—what she calls—my “wild-cat schemes,” she would begin to look upon me with a new eye. I am very human _au fond_, dear Aunt, and, in my own way, I adore Hazel. Would you not try to persuade her to be more kind and understanding?—I am, your affectionate nephew, HORACE MUN-BROWN _P.S._—On reading this letter through, I find that I have made what looks rather like a pun—that passage about Hazel and a nutshell. I assure you, my dear Aunt, it was unintentional. I should never joke about love. XXXIV RICHARD HAVEN TO VERENA RABY MY DEAR, I have found you a Reader, but I hate to part with her. It would not, however, do for anyone so young and comely to sit at the bedside of a hale man of my years, and so you shall have her. But O her voice! Irish, and south-west Irish at that. In point of fact, Kerry, with hints of the Gulf Stream in it, all warm and caressing. Miss Clemency Power—that is her pretty name—is not, I take it, in any kind of need, but she worked all through the War and wants to continue to be independent. And quite right too, say I. And Robbie Burns said it before me, in one of his English efforts:— the glorious privilege of being independent, he called it. Miss Power is going to you on Thursday on a month’s probation, and she is my gift to you, remember: I have arranged it all. It is very Sultanic to be distributing young women like this, and you must be properly grateful. I was never Sultanic before. Here’s a nice thing my sister Violet’s charwoman said yesterday. Violet seems to have been looking rather more wistful than usual, but for no particular reason. The charwoman, however, noticed it and commented upon it.