"DEAR MR. SMITH,--You never come to Boston any more, do you? Or when you come, do you see some other lady? Assuming for the sake of argument that you don't come, I can't help feeling rather relieved, for if you ever thought my mind at all above the deadest dead level of my sex--a sex that most gentlemen either secretly or openly believe to be vastly inferior mentally to their own, anyway--you would receive a fearful shock if you should arrive and see me now. For no girl could more enthusiastically have thrown herself into the combination of things with which the comic papers most dearly love to associate the conventionally idiotic feminine--clothes and weddings. In this case the wedding has not yet occurred, but the clothes are in one way or another occurring nearly every twenty minutes; and far from being ashamed of my interest in such petty and ephemeral things, I have actually enjoyed the campaign--in which I have taken both an active and advisory part--toward completing a trousseau for the prospective bride. "However, one thing gives me courage to confess this to you, and that is that I have merely followed out my natural tastes and inclinations, and I think you have a theory that anything absolutely natural has a right to exist. I hope I'm not wrong and that you really have such a theory, for it has cheered me up quite a lot, because I don't believe any one ever took a more vivid interest in clothes than I have done for the last ten days. "I suppose by this time you are thinking I have talked so much about it that I must be acquiring this trousseau for myself, but such is not the case. The bride-to-be is Isabel, who has finally decided to marry Charlie Wilkinson at once, and without waiting longer for a change which may never occur. Miss Hurd, who inherits some of her father's sagacity, has always acted on the theory that if you consistently neglect to do things which absolutely have to be done, some one else will always do them for you,--and in this affair I am the some one else, doing most of the real work while Isabel placidly speculates on whether her father will or won't relent at the eleventh hour. "I could save her the trouble of her speculations, for I know John M. pretty well, and the number of times he has changed his mind in the course of his life cannot be more than six! But Isabel argues that he reversed his decision once before on a matter in which the ingenious Mr. Wilkinson figured, and so he may do again. But up to now there are no signs of any such happy conclusion, for Mr. Hurd stands on his promise that if Isabel marries Charlie, her doom will be on her own head, so to speak. He has more than once thrown out the fine old conventional paternal threat--'not one penny, and so forth'--which would give me, I admit, far more concern than it seems to occasion either of the interested parties.