“I am no longer a young girl. I am a grown-up woman. I want to know what the world is like. I hear every one talking of parliament and politics and foreign countries, and I am ignorant of it all, my dear Exquisite Auntship. I have a right to know everything about life. You must let me read the newspapers.” “Well, wait just a little, dearest,” said Lady Blount. And the next time John Risca and Walter Herold came down, she took counsel of them, and they reluctantly agreed that no longer could the old régime of the Unwritten Law be enforced. Stella must have her newspaper. Thenceforward, every morning, the portentous package of “The Times” (none of your sensational half-penny shockers!) was laid upon Stella's lap, and she read, poor child, the foreign news, and the leaders, and all the solemn and harmless and unimportant matters in big print until she yawned her pretty head off, in vast disappointment with newspapers. It all seemed to her ingenuous mind such a wordy fuss about nothing. Still, she read conscientiously about tariff reform and naval armaments and female suffrage and the pronouncements of the German Emperor and home rule for Ireland, in the puzzled assurance that thereby she was fitting herself for her future place in the great world. But one day Lady Blount, going into the pleasant morning room where Stella now usually had her being, found her sitting with tragic face, staring out of the window, the decorous “Times” lying a tousled, crumpled mass on the floor. She was alarmed. “Darling, what's the matter?” “Oh, it's hateful! It's unthinkable! Why did n't you tell me that such things happened nowadays?” “What things?” Stella pointed to the outraged organ of British respectability. “A day or two ago--it 's all true that 's in the newspaper, is n't it? It's not made up? It all happens?--a day or two ago, while we were laughing here, a man took a knife and killed his wife and three children. It's incredible that there can be such monsters in the world.” “My darling, when you know a little more,” faltered Lady Blount, “you will learn that there are abnormal people who do these dreadful things and get reported in the newspapers. But they have nothing to do with us. You must n't be frightened. We never come across them. Our life is quite different.” “But what does that matter?” cried the girl, with agonized eyes. “They exist. They are among us, whether we happen to meet them or not. They are like the tramps.” The world-worn woman, lined and faded, her red hair turned almost gray now, put her arms around the girl, and sought physically to bring the comfort that her intelligence was not acute enough to convey in speech. Stella hid her face against the kind bosom and sobbed. “Auntie dear, I'm frightened, so frightened!” “Of what, darling?” “Of ugliness and wickedness and horror.”