WE SPEAK now of that parent-troubling daughter of Mrs. Dodge’s as she came to be through weltering experience, most of it hurried and all of it crowded. For do we not know that there are maidens of twenty-three who have already lived a lifetime? Such is their own testimony. They have had a view of all the world can offer, and foresee the rest of their existence as mere repetition, not stirring to the emotions. Life henceforth is to be but “drab,” they say, several decades of them having strongly favoured the word; and this mood, often lasting for days at a time, usually follows one form or another of amatory anticlimax. Not infrequently the anticlimax is within the maiden herself; she finds herself lacking in certain supremities of feeling that appear not only proper but necessary, if the sentimental passions are to be taken at all seriously. “It is all over—I shall never care for any man—I shall never marry—I shall never feel anything about anything again,” such a one wrote to a girl confidant abroad, and fully believed what she wrote. “I am tired of everything,” she continued. “I am all dead within me. I look at things, but I do not see them. I see nothing—nothing absolutely!” And yet at that very moment, as she glanced absently out of the window beside her pretty green-painted desk, her attention became concentrated upon a young man passing along the suburban boulevard below. He was a stranger, but a modish and comely one; she could not accurately call him “nothing,” nor maintain that he was invisible;—her eyes followed him, in fact, until he had passed out of the range of her window. Then, with perfect confidence that she set forth the truth, she turned back to her letter and continued: